Civility and Honor ~ Making Up the Rules Myself

We were three women standing side by side – taller and older and far more weathered versions of the eleven-year-olds we were when we first met.  Life, that bitch of a word, had happened in the last nearly thirty years. A lot of it, that two of us do not know about each other. The woman in the middle, the bride, had tied a string to both of us, held us close and far and close again, from half a world away, and so we were both here, as she started her life over, again, with a man who makes her smile in ways I remember from those years before high school, before the tight lips and drunken eyes of our black-clad teen years. But there was no wistful nostalgia in that three woman circle. Not for me. And so there was no group hug, no warm embrace to close the circle. Because of me. The one who would not budge.

If you know me at all – in real life or even just here – you know that I am an opinionated person.  I believe certain things without waver.  I am also able to see a thousand shades of gray and can understand the reasons behind mistreating each other. But seeing them does not make me forgive the ways we (myself included) wage war on each other day by day. I also believe, deeply, in being kind to people. In giving someone the benefit of the doubt, in knowing that I have no idea what they are facing, that very day, that may cause them to be short or rude or glib. And from arm’s length I will forgive that for almost everyone.  But I will not be your friend if you think less of me than any other human on this planet.  I will be civil (that loaded word of antiquity) but I will not have real conversations or share my life or act falsely happy to see you.  I will be what I call real. What often just looks bitchy.

I am a compassionate person.  And if you mean enough to me, if we have enough history, and the loss would be immense, I will fight tooth and nail to work out our differences, to find a place to meet, in the middle or just to the side of it – wherever need be – in order to stay connected. In order to be friends. But my face hides nothing.  It is virtually impossible for me to pretend when it comes to real emotions (which, perhaps, makes holding to my convictions, if not easier, more necessary than for some people).

So when this long-ago friend came up to me as I was talking, for the first time that wedding day, to the bride – to the woman who links us both now – and acted happy to see me and put her arm around me and asked how I was, I answered, good, but I kept my arms at my side and my face neutral.  Against accepted social order and politeness.  Against expectation.  It’s such a small thing really – what I did not do.  I did not hug back. I also did not pull away. Or make a scene.  I simply stood still, smiled a small upturn of my lip and let my arm remain at my side.  And she said, oh, we don’t want a hug, do we? while she stood up and stiffened and looked me in the eyes.

What I did do, though, was keep my mouth shut except to say no, not really, but thanks. Out of respect for the bride and the moment and the space we all filled that day, one of love and lightness and laughing, I walked away while answering her last question, which included what to me sounded like a back-handed stab at the bride for having left this woman’s mother out of the festivities.  I smiled at the bride and walked back to my table and my friends and those I love. Instead of saying what I wanted to say. Instead of saying what I would have said had the moment been different. Instead of defending myself, for that moment and all the ones before.

I sat down next to my boyfriend and told him that Sasha was in full effect. Sasha Beesh. What we call me when I am being, seriously or otherwise, a bitch. It is a pet name. But it is serious, too. I draw lines.  When I need to, I will. And I will, if the situation is right and I think there is use in it, tell you why. And then I will think, sometimes say, that I am such a bitch.  Wherein bitch is firm. Wherein bitch is rigid. Wherein bitch is honest.

Naming it that, naming myself a bitch is simultaneously a prayer to the sky that I do not react roughly unnecessarily and a slice through to the comic of life – look at me, bitching it up everywhere – don’t look at me, I’m just acting up over here. It is a way to hold it at arm’s length, this way I am, to stare at it and laugh at it until I know for sure, each time, if it was the right way to be.

It was but a few minutes in the almost seven hour event. But it is the kind of encounter that can leave me conflicted, that can take up brain space for hours, for days, until I decide how I feel about my own actions.

Instead, I let go of that moment and went on to have a fabulous time at the wedding. And this long-ago friend sat at the wedding party table throughout the night and was composed and dignified and reserved. While my friends and I were loud and rowdy and danced ridiculously and laughed so hard that my voice was hoarse by the end of the evening. We could not have had more different evenings, she and I, although I would guess that, my presence aside, she had a great time, too. In her way. Just as I did in mine.

What has stuck in my brain, what is getting turned around and around since that night last month, is the question of how I should have acted – by my standards, by anyone’s standards, by her standards – versus what really happened and how the gaps between those expectations define me. Moments like these, which happen not infrequently in my life, force me to look at myself and my ways of being and to try to walk the fine line of my own personal code, balance between my integrity and ethos and trying to still be polite in the ways that I define that word, while still minding that others define that word very differently than I do. I do not want to hurt people.  I do not want to start fights.  I do not want to make a big deal out of things that need not be enlarged. Mostly, I don’t want to be an asshole unless being an asshole is the only acceptable option.

If I feel that it is worth it, I will make a mountain out of what I feel is a sheet-covered mountain.  I will call a spade a spade, to use another cliché.  I will describe its outline and fill in that shape, mark it clearly as what it is, and then feel good about not having tiptoed around a delicate moment for the sake of propriety or decorum or civility.

If not, I will walk away. Let it go. 

Sometimes, I will do the first and then decide later that I should have walked away.

And, you see, the details of why I won’t hug this woman or pretend to believe her joy at seeing me are as ridiculous and as serious as it gets.  So my response to her greeting is both disproportionately gruff and entirely too kind. We reconnected more than a decade ago at an event I was hosting in grad school.  Her husband was reading and I was shocked – and happy – to see her.  I could tell, without knowing for sure at that time, that she had returned to the religion of her childhood – Mormonism. I introduced her to my girlfriend and assumed that I would never hear from her again. I wasn’t sure about that, but I would have been surprised to have her be positive about this aspect of my life. Still I was honest and knew that those who fall away need to – that secrecy is no way to handle these reunions in life.

Years and years later, she sought out being my friend on facebook.  Ahhh, I thought, she is more open-minded than the majority of her Mormon cohorts.  But she quietly and covertly unfriended me after enough time to realize who I was and what I stood for . . . I noticed when we both commented on the same thing and it gave me the tell-tale how-many-friends-in-common link below her name.  And while it didn’t really matter, in the large scheme – I never figured we’d have a deep and meaningful relationship – it did stab. Why seek me out? Why make me think you knew me and still wanted in? Why do it so secretly? Why not just say, like a grown-up, that you found my views loud and offensive and judgmental and then I could say ok  and we could be cordial in public because I believe what I believe and you believe what you believe and que sera sera. When I noticed online that she had unfriended me, we had a small group reunion coming up in a few weeks and I wondered how much awkwardness would be packed into that day and night if she did, in fact, show up.

She didn’t. And hasn’t. To anything until this wedding. Until she had to in order to be included in such an important day for such a close friend. And instead of standing tall and keeping her distance, she feigned excitement and emoted too much and then recoiled when I did what I felt was most honest in that moment – held back and stood firm.

And what bothers me most is multi-faceted, of course. Initially, I was and am insulted that she dumped me. Not out of some personal pride, really. I was and am most offended by the fact that I find her religion an affront to my very being. I am offended (and hurt) by the money and rhetoric her church spends on attempting to negate the lives of people like me and people I love. Over and over and over.

And yet.

And yet I could have stayed friends in that virtual way of these times.  I could have, would have, been polite and respectful of her beliefs. I can not, though, – and did not – keep my mouth shut in my own little pocket of the internet universe. And that, apparently, is what she would have preferred. It is my virtual ramblings that sent her to the unfriend button, that made her tell a friend that I was judging her and trying to tell her what to think, that made her disappear instead of glossing over my words and standing firm in her own beliefs at the same time. It was her inability to hold that we can occupy space on opposite sides of the spectrum and still be friendly, if not friends.

The difference, though, between us lies exactly in that action and the encounter at the wedding. Where she shunned the confrontation of being honest and then acted against the honesty of just steering clear of me – where those things happen, where fake emotion replaces the truth of the matter is where I can not abide.  I detest phoney – phoney smiles, phoney friendships, phoney greetings.  Be real. Even if that might, to an onlooker, seem rude.  I prefer to know exactly where I stand with you.  And I will give you that same respect in return.  Don’t give me that honesty and I will still react honestly.  It’s how I know how to be. It’s the only way I will feel ok with myself later. Even if I wonder, in the moment, if I am being harsh. If I am being a bitch.

The chord that strikes in these kinds of social tangos is a deep one for me.  I struggled, long and painfully, to fully rid myself of the shame and guilt and embarrassment of living a life that makes people unfriend you, that makes people leer at you in public, that makes people say they have nothing against you but a portion of their paycheck goes to proving otherwise. Landing outside of that ingrained shame means I have no patience for, no play with, no space in my life for people who do not have at least the decency to be real with me. Having fought that battle with myself, I am virtually incapable of playing along with some social song and dance in the name of ‘politeness’ when I know you’d rip the rug out from under me if you could – and, more than likely, you are trying to with every tithing and every political donation.

I can only suppose that, for her, feigning joy at seeing me felt right. It felt like the socially acceptable way to behave in the situation.  That it felt like respect for the moment, for the bride, maybe even for me, as she sees me. I would suppose that there is a canyon between how she sees that moment play and the way I do.

I would guess that the biggest difference is this: my arms at my side was the most respectful thing I could do for her in that moment. Honesty is the kindest thing, for me, in moments like that.  For her, even. Respect for her beliefs and freeing her from the fake smiles and inevitable questions that lead to answers she doesn’t care about and doesn’t want to hear. Where she probably sees my action as rude, I see it as kind, to us both.

To be fake would be an affront to my own beliefs, too.  I would feel I was selling out the ethics and morals I stand for if I play kissy-face-greeting with someone who sees me as less than a full person. I would be saying: Sure, hate me, hate people I love, fight against our very being and I will still hold to decorum and embrace you as though there is anything real in this moment. As if when we part, you will not still wage war against me and those I love.

Bitchy? I guess so.

Polite? Not by most people’s standards.

But today, still, I feel ok with it.  I wish I hadn’t been forced into opting out of that hug, into doing that with the bride between us.  And I don’t hate her.  I truly don’t. I have a lot of feelings about how isolating it is to move outside of the lines of religions like Mormonism, especially if you were raised in it. But understanding it, feeling for people whose whole lives rests within specific codes of conduct, knowing the loneliness of people who leave such religions behind – none of that changes what is right, for me.

I make up my own standard of conduct. In a way, I make it up as I go along. But it is guided by a deep and abiding sense of what is right – outside of religion and commandments and holy creeds – what is right and true, as a human, as someone who believes in the sanctity of each person’s right to be and be respected. Dear Abby and Emily Post have no sway with me. I am incapable, really, of rote social grace. My code is constantly assessed and evaluated, but I will do what I must to be true, to myself. To say what needs to be said and to swallow what does not.

To say, without saying (if the time is wrong to speak), that I won’t play along.

To say, when it needs to be said: I know what you think.  And not only do I not agree.  I am offended – as a human, as a one-time long-ago friend, as an adult you tricked into believing you felt different – and so I will not hug you.  I will not kiss your cheek and make small talk.  I will hold firm.  And then walk away.  Out of a sense of propriety.  Out of my own code of civility.  To be honest.  With you.  But mostly, with myself.

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Staking My Claim: Swimming in Happy

If you’re not getting happier as you’re getting older… then you’re fucking up.
– Ani Difranco, If Yr Not

Randomly, one afternoon last week, I experienced that heart-swollen feeling of looking at the image of a child that you love so much you have nearly no words for it, not the right ones anyway.  Words are not enough for that kind of love, for the way the sight of them almost hurts, makes you ache with what it is that bursts open inside of you.

I was looking at a lovely picture that my sister-in-law took of her middle son – a simulated superman pose in goofy goggles and cowboy boots, a boy on the ground who appears to be floating above a chalk and asphalt skyline.  I literally felt the pressure of my chest swelling, pushing out.  I almost wanted to cry for how perfect I think he is without missing, ever, all of his peculiar traits and inevitable imperfections.  He is my happiness, incarnate, as are his brothers.

Abstractly, I know they bring me joy – real, pure joy.  But it is these tiny moments that resonate, that ring through my bones, prove to me that love is tangible and real.  And my life is full of these moments.  Of my littlest nephew’s heavy head against my shoulder as his almost-too-long-to-be-on-my-lap body twitches and writhes and fights sleep as we sit in the sun on a gloriously sunny day at the end of January.  The way I feel when his body relaxes and his breathing steadies and he gives in to sleep, right there on my chest and in my arms.  My arms are sore, I am sweating everywhere he is on me, but I can’t move.  I won’t.  Because he will be too long for my lap soon.  And this is heaven, this precise moment, the particular feel of his weight gone fully slack against me.

The way the oldest nephew slumps his shoulders when I say the words he hates to hear me say: I have to go.  His reluctant hug as I squeeze him tighter and tighter until he complains.  The smell of his sweaty hair after he’s been rolling in the grass all day long playing football.  The rock on sign he flashes me as I walk away.

My heart swells.  All of the time.

Toward the end of 2010, I was haunted by the image of me standing on the bank of a river, readying for the kind of leap I feared most – one that meant leaving love behind, making one of life’s most painful choices.  I knew I was making the leap, would have to, but I was planted firmly in the dirt, unable and not ready to jump, for so many reasons.

Throughout 2011 I used the term treading often.  I was treading constantly: no permanent home, no steady work yet, no idea what to do with a love I still have trouble containing that is neither here nor there and all over the place.  I was emotionally stationary while in constant motion in the middle of the deep blue sea, feet kicking, arms circling, neck muscles tense and stiff and elongated, water lapping at my chin.  Every muscle in my body working to keep my mouth and nose above water. I dreamed about floating as though it were a fantastical place only elves and gnomes could find, longed for it with every fiber of my body.

By the opening of 2012 I had crossed over, fully, but I was still gazing back at the other side of that river.  Necessarily.  To feel it all, completely. Then I bid it all farewell.  And I’ve spent the first handful of weeks of 2012 remembering how to float, reacquainting myself with that calm, lovely place that is once again right here with me.

Through it all, I’ve never lost sight of the happy in my life – there are so many happys in my life – but the happy was overwhelmed, overshadowed by the treading, the settling, the mourning.  What I have done in the last year and a half is absolutely right – for me.  Where I am now is exactly where I should be.  And there is so much that makes me smile and laugh and gasp with the best kinds of surprise.  There is so much happy to be had.

Photo Courtesy of Jen Neitzel

A friend of mine, Jen Neitzel, posted a New Year’s project in January to help focus on the happy in your life.  She shared a picture of herself holding her own list of directions for naming thirty things that make you authentically happy.  Such an essentially simple idea.  Such an amazingly powerful idea.

I made a mental card and slipped it into my brain’s card catalog (yes, I am that old).  I saved that idea for a future date. This week something triggered a thought that reminded me of her post, reminded me that I wanted to take her idea and make something out of it – make a board of some sort where I could pin or tape or velcro words or pictures or memories of things that make me happy, that fill my bones, that expand my ribs with love.  Something I could keep up year round, for years to come, something I could edit and adjust and keep as an evolving depiction of all the things that make my heart swell.

So I did.

The same afternoon that I saw my nephew in superhero pose, I also read My Girl Thursday’s post about Sarah Rooftop’s 3 Things February.  She challenges us to end our day with writing down three things that made us smile or laugh that day.  Three happy things.  As MGT says, you don’t have to worry about the pressure and weight of gratitude – you simply remember three things that brought you happiness in a day.  I have started this and am going to continue at least through February.

So far, in only a handful of days, I have been brought to hysterical tears while sitting in a charming new restaurant only blocks from my house and felt the warmth of that first thick, sweet sip of a small batch American whiskey and shared it with my father, comparing notes, toasting to all of this time we now have together.

I have stood outside in the cold after midnight on a ‘school’ night having a serious conversation with a hysterically funny and rambunctious new friend after spending an evening being ridiculous together at an SF dance club.  I have laughed, a deep belly burst of laughter, after seeing a stranger’s face when I told him to take it easy with my friend because I have brass knuckles implanted under my skin.

I have lost my train of thought while my eyes scrunched and I nearly snort laughed as my sister’s nine-months-pregnant-belly jiggled dramatically from a tiny little laugh that escaped her mouth.

I have walked, for hours, in the winter sun, around this island I love to call home and walked out of the hardware store and went across the street to the beach where I could take off my shoes and sink my toes in the sun-warmed sand.  I felt the deep-chest-love of seeing the world seem to disappear on the horizon, water trailing off into nothingness, that feeling of being right at the edge of it all.

And there’s more.  A lot more.  In only the first five days of this month.

I am lucky.  Truly.

Being on this side of the river is returning me to myself.  If 2011 was that river that needed crossing – tumultuous, choppy, crucial – then 2012 is the far bank, the one I was aiming for, the one I needed to get to, come hell or high water.  And I’m here.  I made it through the swim, I survived the climb back up and the view is pretty fucking stunning no matter where I turn, even when the sky splits open and churns the air at a dangerous speed.  I am here.  Where I was going.

Here.  Me.

I finally have the kind of time and energy and focus to do what I do best: Do. Make. Create. Laugh.  Even when life is hard.  Especially when life is hard.  I spent one quiet evening with myself, making this board that brings to life the moments that light through my veins and swell my heart.

Because life isn’t what happens when you’re not looking. Life is what happens in every moment – in all of the good and the bad and all of the in-betweens –  and you best look, best see it and know it and smell it and try to get it down, however you can.  Life is better when more of those moments are remembered for making you smile, for making your eyes sore with laughter, for falling over from the funny of it, for the way your heart will grow, grinch-style, with every beautiful thing surrounding you. For remembering the things that hurt in the best of ways, that make you ache at the sight of them, the beauty that’s always there no matter how much shit life hands you.

Here is my Swollen Heart Board (and here is how I made it, with only things I had in the house).  I will change it out regularly to keep myself focused on the moments we all live for, the ones that get us through, the ones we earn with every hard choice, with every devastating scene or decision or fact of life.  The stuff that is always worth it.  Bliss, micro or otherwise.

Hey, you’re not *that* cool . . . but you totally rock.

I was driving north on 880, heading toward and about to pass the Oakland Coliseum (whose corporate name I refuse to use) when I remembered my longtime friend, K, acting like a complete spaz while we were stuck in pre-concert traffic for U2 in 1992. She was probably wearing overalls and may have even had a beret on. She was screaming at a high pitch and slamming her open hands against the felt-upholstered ceiling of my Civic hatchback.  I was laughing hysterically and telling her that she was hurting my ears.  U2 was her favorite band and to say she was excited was, obviously, an understatement.

She was one of my newest close friends and I adored her.  She made me laugh and she was brilliant and we were both taking a literature class together. Our Tuesday reenactments of SNL were the highlights to my academic week. Our professor had to tell us to keep quiet on a weekly basis and we could lose our composure over something as ridiculous as Sprockets or sit and talk about the images in Ellison’s Invisible Man. We had a lot in common but she was also less experienced in the trouble-making that had filled my life and my high school friends’ lives. I was charmed by her seeming innocence at the same time that I knew she was no saint, as I could see the devil winking just behind her eyes.  From the beginning, one of the things I instantly loved about her (& still do) is that she was unafraid to be excited, to be loud, to make a scene if a scene was called for . . . and she was just so damn cute freaking out over a concert while we sat inching along in my car. That forgotten image made me smile in that out-loud way, mumbled words slipping out of my mouth even though I was alone, because I was that surprised by how vivid and unexpected that memory was while I was simply driving home from work.

The perspective necessary to get even a glimpse into how this memory struck me in the here and now is this: K is now (still) brilliant and wise in the ways of the world and self-possessed and gorgeous and a classic beauty and hilarious and very well-heeled.  She has style.  Several of us now call her our Cruise Director and when you go out about the town with her in Fresno, it seems that she knows everyone or, actually, that they all know her – she is unforgettable and magnetic.  She was already becoming this woman when I met her and to see her now is to not see who she was in 1991, at all, unless you knew her then.  This particular memory, on this particular day, was like a stage light shining directly on the contrast between who she was at 19 or 20 and who she is now, at 38.  And by extension, between who I was and who I am.  And the same for all of my other long-ago, still-friends who made up our ragtag tribe of super smart burnouts.

For the rest of the night, my mind traveled through a whole string of anything-but-free associations . . . one memory leading to another and then another. To a long ago night with J – one of the worst nights of my life were I to judge it based solely on bad decisions – where she saw me at my craziest, at my most lovesick, at my most desperately angry and heart-hurt and vengeful.  Among an embarrassing armful of moments over those three days, the one image that consistently stands out is of me sitting on the passenger-side window-ledge of my own car while J drove at least sixty miles per hour down a quiet road as we crossed town at one in the morning – my hair thrown back by the wind and my hands on the roof of the car and my voice screaming something (who knows what) constantly and me leaning into the car to make myself heard as she drove and drove and laughed.  We had called the police on a party as a vendetta and we were on our way to pick up a very sweet man/boy and I was as drunk as I ever have been in my life. She and I spent the whole holiday weekend together –  the two of us wandering through days with her family and my family and a whole mix of friends and near-strangers.

It was a bad weekend for both of us, even more so for her.  Really bad.  But sometimes I can just remember that image of me in that car and simultaneously cringe for the girl who could have died that night while I can also appreciate that we were Thelma and Louise: set loose on the road, there for each other, keeping pace with each other, barreling full-force ahead into bad decisions and good decisions and getting through and offering each other aspirin every late, late morning of that long weekend when we would shake our heads and tip-toe through those first waking moments of yet another day of what might be funny if it weren’t so gawd-awful.

To know J now is to know someone who is caring and thoughtful and responsible (and, of course, as are all of my close friends – hilarious and brilliant and sharp sharp sharp). She is a mother and a student and is a real adult charged with caring for an energetic boy, a woman who takes that role so very seriously – and yet she will still take that late night drive with me, more safely and definitely sober, should I need for her to drive me far away ever again. We have known each other since we were twelve and so there is no way to pretend, to ourselves or each other, that we are really as cool as we might try to act on a day-to-day basis.  And don’t get me wrong.  We are cool.  All of us.  Really fucking cool.  And smart and funny.  Really really funny.  But we are also those girls from junior high lunch period who accidentally let a boy find a letter that talks about him and the girls whose faces turned red and whose giggles were so nervous and who only a year later, ditched class and mouthed off to administration and passed out on the sidewalk during lunch.  We are all of these girls to each other even while we are the women we are today, right now, right here.

I have more than a handful of these people that I have now known for over twenty years (some, even, close to thirty years now).  That makes me feel old and is sometimes so hard to believe – that I have been an adult that long.  What else it does, though, is ground me.  I am not who I am right now.  And neither is K or J or any of my other ‘old’ friends.  I am also who you knew me to be then.  And you are who I knew you to be. The mere existence of these people in my life is like a tether to earth when I feel like I am filling with helium and losing touch with gravity. They are each a loving lead weight tied to the curled-end ribbon of my life.

One of the friends I have known for more than twenty years – who has been the most constant presence in my adult life, whether we go a week or a year without talking – is the first call I made when I realized I was about to start a serious dismantling of my life, before even my partner knew the depth of what was happening for me.  E was the voice I longed for when I knew – knew before I could even articulate it – that I was making decisions that were going to unravel it all.  It was her I needed to hear say you are not crazy – it’s ok – how does it feel?.  I couldn’t have told you then, but I know now, that the history we share is why it could only be her, why it could only be someone who knows the long list of your life and can measure the gray against all of the shades of your growing up and living, not just the you standing in that moment: lost and sure and terrified.

It’s somewhat like those of us who have been friends that long have bookends to hold ourselves together: the then us & the now us, everything in between is the stuff we are really made of and will continue to make ourselves out of, day by day by day. I stand in the middle while what these friends have known me and still know me to be pushes against both sides of me, pressing me into myself, reminding me of where it all touches, of how hard some of it pushes, compressing us, writing in the margins to remind us who we really are, scribbled notes and messages from all sorts of past version of ourselves filling the story of our lives as they happen.

And I believe I do that for them.  You are not just the woman married to the man you love now.  I was there for your first wedding.  I was there when you knew that marriage was over.  I held your hair, in the most literal and figurative of ways, when you were figuring out how to bear the world around you and then you did the same for me.  I drove you home and stayed with you when neither of us were sure if morning would ever really happen, the melodrama of youth an epoch we both traveled through together . It’s not so much a mirror we hold up for each other as much as a ghostly reach into the ribcage where we can put our hands on each other’s pumping hearts and remind each other of all of the blood that’s passed through it. Remind us that blood will still pump through it no matter how strained that muscle feels – see, right there, just like that.

These friends and I still make mistakes – together and alone – and we still work them out together.  Say what we think: yes, I heard you all say I would end up heartbroken. And also say what needs to be said when all of that first saying is done and gone: you will be fine – you’ll better than fine, in fact – I know you will.  And we believe each other in a way that is unique (at least I do) because we have seen each other be broken and then fixed over and over again. We’ve witnessed the surviving that newer friends have only heard about.

I trust you because you saw me before.  You saw me risk my life because I didn’t value it enough to hold it closer.  You saw me petty and bitter and loving and dumb. And you saw me pick up from all of that and go on living and I saw you do the same.  We will have grown-up dinners and such grown-up conversations and we are, really, just a bunch of grown-ups who still love each other and care about the small stuff.  Whether we remember our twelve-year-old selves or not.  We like who we are now, too. Whether we’re talking about where to buy boots or how much daycare costs or how little time we have after cleaning and working and all of that grown-up stuff. Especially if we are talking about death and sickness and the way that life just keeps handing you this stuff you don’t want.  Certainly when we are jumping up and reenacting the most bizarre movie scenes or ad-libbing demented songs or plotting for one-woman shows and podcasts and coffee table books.

I am blessed with ‘new’ friends – who I’ve known a year or ten or twelve – and I love them fiercely.  They have been there for me in ways I could have never lived without and hope to never have to go without. There’s a whole other value in people who have only known you as an adult – a way that they see you that helps you through, a liberating sense of being just who you are now, free from the details of the past. Then there are also these ‘old’ friends who quite literally knew me before I had breasts, before I could drive, before I could see an R-rated movie all by myself, before I knew just how much I deserve. The span of our friendships has hit me hard in the last year – as I realize I am old enough to know someone for that long.  The luck of it all has washed over me, too.

There are a lot of things to love and value in friendships that have lasted this long, that have spanned from that bra-less and brace-faced time in life to now (and hopefully beyond).  What I’m in love with right now, though, is that there is something so unique and entirely necessary in facing people who knew you then: when you were awkward and clumsy and full of self-doubt and just figuring out who it is you were going to grow up to be.  It’s true that I’ve been a lot of different versions of grown-up and probably will continue to morph and change as I continue to age.  I have a sense of self now, though, that 19-year-old me would have killed for.  I have a faith in my own strength and brains and beauty (whatever that word means to any of us) that teenage me longed for in a deeply physical way.  And I am sure all of my friends feel the same.  No matter how much we still struggle with life and self-doubt and hard times – there is a whole laundry list of things that make us infinitely stronger, infinitely cooler, outrageously more self-assured than we were twenty years ago.

When we face each other, we sometimes see those young selves.  We might even have a slight tinge of embarrassment when we picture those young faces, remember those young actions.  So if I’m having a day where I feel pretty fucking awesome and like a hot 38-year-old rock star version of myself,  I just need to remember the me that shared way too much about an upcoming surgery with a guy I was hoping to date while slightly drunk at a party at our flat in the Outer Richmond and the fact that he never ever did call me and I was sure it was that bit about the exploratory intestinal surgery that killed any hotness he might have thought I had. And my friends were there to witness it, to hear me recount it the next day, to laugh at me and learn that life lesson of dating right along with me – never share too much or the wrong things too early.  I can’t ever fully convince myself that I’m that cool when I have someone around to remind me that I’m really just the same fumbling idiot I was in 1991.

But when we see those young selves through the face that hangs from our skull now, we also see how much we’ve grown, in all the right ways.  When those memories are set right next to the friend we know now, who will still be loud and ridiculous in public with me – but does it with a grace I knew, even then, she had inside of her – then we know what it is we’ve earned in life.  Our now selves are made more real, more striking, by having someone who can hold up the old self and laugh at it with us.  Remember the sincerity of that lost girl and everything she had the potential of becoming – and did.  Remember the way that hurt and how much we still managed to laugh at it all.  Remind us of things we may have even forgotten – yes, I did do that, didn’t I?  Bring us back to ourselves, over and over and over. They know our past in ways not even our families do – so intimately and lovingly and implicitly.

They are the red against our green, making us a more vivid emerald color than we would be alone. They are the amplifier to our stereo sound.  They are the backlight that pushes through the canvas and shows us the texture over which the paint is laid. There is so much to appreciate in decades-long friendships, but today I love you ladies (and awesome men) I knew back then because you know me, in a deeply embarrassing way, and still love me, still see me for who I am and who I was.  You know me in ways no one else can ever know me – with layers and layers that stack up to this top image.  Me.  And I know you in the same ways.  Ridiculous.  Fabulous.  And grown.

Fare Well, FoHo: The Old ‘Hood, Naked Barbies & Feeling Exiled.

Almost immediately after reaching cruising altitude on my flight to Portland last month, when that slow upward movement started to level out, I began to feel an intensely physical pull from my chest.  It felt as though a cable were looped through my sternum – a thick, heavy-duty braided steel cable – and it was pulling me, and the plane, forward.  And down.  The most delicate, almost imperceptible sloping down toward the ground.  It wasn’t frightening.  It was disorienting. I could almost feel the hand on the lever using real strength to crank the cable in, bit by bit by bit. It felt like someone was tugging me toward the meeting of the Willamette and the Columbia – that picturesque point of Kelly Point Park where you can see both rivers merging and pushing out toward the ocean. Like my body telling me I was going home.  Like Portland pulling me closer, whispering here, here, here I am, waiting. 

The sensation was so physical that I pulled out a section of newspaper and began writing down how it felt – scribbling around the margins of the fluff stories and comics and word puzzles.  I could feel the cranking, the slow-motion jerk stop-and-start of that kind of cabling system.  I felt a little dizzy, off center.  My plane was definitely going forward – it was certainly level – and yet.  Yet it felt like I was sloping so slowly forward and down, forward and down, magnetized toward Portland. Like we might stage an adventurous and fabulous water landing just past the Fremont Bridge, slowing quickly enough to stop well before hitting the St John’s Bridge.  A grand entrance.  Home.  Finally.

The time gone – seven months since my one and only visit after moving – became just a moment in my life.  I almost felt like I was flying home to Portland.  It was my first time flying since moving back to California, so it felt like all of those return trips from California I had made in the last year of living in Portland.  Which conjured a whole other set of sense-memories that further derailed my equilibrium, a blender full of emotions and broken relationships and wayward feelings. I kept pulling that twice-folded piece of newspaper out of the seat-pocket and scribbling all over it, searching for clear grey space, wanting desperately to remember how this flight felt physically – the way it tricked my mind and my body and my heart.  The way this jumbling of home and memory and heartache played itself out in my muscles and bones and on my skin.

I was excited to visit.  Of course I was.  I missed my friends and my places.  I also hadn’t had a relatively stress-free time in Portland in a long time.  My last year there was wrought with tension and stress and emotional overload.  Even my first visit to Portland after moving was so intense that it has left an after-taste in my mouth somewhat akin to drinking cheap whiskey straight from the bottle – unforgettable and head-turning and grimace inducing.

Nothing was easy on that first trip.  I was deep in the relationship that would unravel a couple of months later – I was at a point where nothing wrong enough had happened but I should have seen the signs in the kinds of long, tedious conversations we acted out on that trip.  In hindsight, I can see the atom-bomb that trip laid in my relationship with Oregon and with Portland and with that ex.  I needed this trip to replace that.  I needed my Portland, not our Portland.  I was looking forward to a true visit – relaxing and funny and stomach-stuffing and full of the weightlessness of good times with good friends.

I also wanted to say a final goodbye to my old neighborhood.  I had tried to do that on the first visit – in fact some of these pictures are from that trip.  It was cold and we walked around taking pictures, my friend and my ex and I, but I didn’t hang out in the places I knew so well.  I didn’t walk in those doors and smell those smells and kiss those places, so quietly and so lovingly, goodbye. I still believed, then, that I would be back at least every month.  I thought I didn’t have to truly let go yet.  I thought I could hold onto the neighborhood I had spent nearly a decade in – the longest of my life so far – so long that it had begun to feel like an extension of my own shoulders, like another set of arms spreading out around me and providing any weird little thing I might need.

What feels like a million years ago (and also only yesterday), when my ex-girlfriend and I bought our house in Portland, it was further away from the center of town than we had hoped.  Our realtor said it was considered the new ‘close-in’ – that coveted real estate term that meant high value and great neighborhood amenities. We gave each other that invisible-wink look – yeah, sure it is, ok.  Whether we believed her or not wasn’t important. We couldn’t afford the neighborhoods we really wanted, so we were opening up to neighborhoods we didn’t know, exploring unfamiliar territory since we were only nine months into our life in Oregon.

When we saw our house, we fell in love pretty quickly.  We had to – it was a hot market and we made an offer about 24 hours after looking at it.  It was barely on the west side of Foster and the east side of Foster used to be called Felony Flats.  It was already in the process of revitalizing (you know, old people dying and young families buying in) when we moved, but the grimiest parts of it were actually endearing to me.  I grew up in Fresno, California and while I lived in ‘nice neighborhoods’ from junior high on, they were still in a part of town that meant we heard gunfire and sirens frequently.  My high school rang out with the sounds of multiple languages and drive-by shootings (the latter, rarely, thank the goodlords, but . . .).

I have always found the sanitized dream of real suburbia discomfiting and so my little ‘hood, right where Holgate and Foster meet, felt instantly like a cozy robe.  I read an article soon after moving about how it was an up and up and coming neighborhood.  They nicknamed it FoHo to try to give it an identity and nudge the process along.  I didn’t ever really think it would take on the prestige of certain other Southeast neighborhoods in town (and neither did anyone else, I’m sure), but I crossed my fingers for more restaurants, cafes, bike shops, non-slick but non-felonious bars.

Throughout the nine years I lived in that house, our small stretches of Foster and Holgate saw the opening and closing of a lot of businesses – including a casket shop, the Atheist Association headquarters and a moped shop.  There was also, though, the long-standing plumbing supply with its large neon water-heater-man logo and the Decorette Shop, full of frosting and cake molds and other domestic treasures, and the Tan and Hide shop that traded gloves for hides and whose antler lamps always called to me through the large picture windows, as well as the Pal-Do market with its dried octopus and seafood delicacies.

We gathered more restaurants – some short-lived – and bars and knick-knack shops.  When Snowpocalypse hit, we could walk (a long walk, to be sure) to the Fred Meyer or we could trek to the Round Table for pizza and salad.  In normal weather, I could walk for breakfast or coffee or beer at a number of local places.  Whenever a store went vacant, we would throw out our wishes – good Thai food, great ice cream, a fruit stand – and wait with baited breath until we saw what went in: a call-center, a poker place, a head shop, another biker bar.  All of it, though, was our ‘hood – sweetly grimy and podunk and traffic-ridden.  Nothing was left of the original cross-town horse and buggy thoroughfare except occasionally the smell of shit.  But it was ours – and it was mine, for a very long time by the standards of my life.  I missed FoHo as much as anything else in Portland, really, if not more.

I planned a whole evening – an open house of sorts – around that intersection of mine at Holgate and Foster.  I invited all of the people I missed and loved to come see me there – in case one on one visits didn’t happen – and then I showed up slightly late to my own party, dropped off in the rain by a friend who would join us later. I walked in to smiles and hugs and hilarious women, to more men and women walking through the door and up to the bar, to more hugs and more laughs and more smiles.  We started at Bar Carlo where I had ordered many a breakfast, where I had leashed my dogs to the water meter outside and ordered many an Americano,  where I had my last Portland meal with some of my best friends on my last night in town.  I had coffee and breakfast for dinner and then ordered a vodka and soda with lime and settled in to see what the night had in store.

We took up half of the side room and more people came in as I handed off a bag of naked barbies I had been holding for months – supplies for a friend who wanted to make a holiday wreath out of them.  One example of the kind of odd cargo I often travel with, having found them at a salvage place in Oakland at the beginning of the year and then moved them several times before putting them in my carry on for this flight to Portland.  And while everyone was already laughing, already joking, catching up with each other, being snarky and sarcastic and heartfelt and basically the amazing people I missed so much – an odd thing happened.

The friend who now had possession of her barbies started to pull them out and perch them on the edge of the table, looking at and inventorying her long-awaited toys. Once one naked barbie was out of the bag, though, all we could do was pose them and photograph them.  In compromising positions.  In miraculous poses.  Hanging from lights.  Bent over glasses.  Bent over each other.  We nicknamed several of these rag-tag plastic beauties.  Inappropriate and perfect names. One friend discovered her knack for shooting just the right barbie porn shot while a male friend (and his wife) realized he was the Barbie Whisperer – able to pose barbies for just the right shot, intuitively, skillfully, artfully.  We laughed and laughed and laughed.  We discovered that Anal Bead Barbie’s string got shorter if you pulled her hair.  We noticed that one barbie was the plastic equivalent to double-jointed. We were all more than a little frightened of Vapid Expression Barbie.

The waiter came through several times before one of my friends said something about what we were doing, about it being strange.  And he said, so matter-of-factly, completely nonplussed, “You’re having a barbie party”.  The silent ‘duh’ was written all over his face. To which we railed off into laughter, again, over and over through the night, replaying his Portland immunity to such weirdness. Of course.  Why would we have thought he might be worried about us?  Think we were strange?  This was Portland.  And Southeast Portland, to boot.

We had so much fun that when the woman who I delivered these barbies to decided she had to leave and we were migrating to our next FoHo stop, she left us with the dolls.  I hesitated, worried about nabbing them away from her so soon after her long-awaited meeting with them and she shoved the bag at me – the obviousness of how much fun was left to be had clear in the gesture. So the handoff was undone and would have to happen again because, apparently, we all love naked barbies.  I was with my people.  For sure.

I carried the reusable grocery bag full of naked dolls over to the newest bar on Foster, a borderline-cheesy Zodiac-themed place owned by Portland Indie-Retail Royalty, and it wasn’t long before the barbies were out on the table, the newest additions to our party just getting into the fun, discovering how fun barbie-in-the-bar photo shoots can be, test shots being taken in this new, darker lighting, against these reflective table-tops.

Then, in the most Portland moment of the night: strangers asked, inquired and then started their own barbie shoots (once I delivered dolls to their tables, their hesitant, shy faces turned grateful and smiling).  For hours, half the bar was engaged in barbie play.  One table staged an elaborate Esther Williams scene – my favorite, really, of the whole night – and another group made napkin clothes and figured out that Turquoise Girdle Barbie actually spun around and so has been named Suck N’ Spin Barbie. The foosball table was filled with posing barbies and others were propped against the oft-ordered bad beers of the northwest.

I was full of vodka and chocolate caramel Torte and love and nostalgia and as I looked around the bar, I knew (deep in my marrow) that this wasn’t home anymore but I also knew exactly – in that wordless way of real love – what I adored and held deeply sacred about this city. I try to get at it with words even though I know I will fail – there’s the kindness and openness and un-self-consciousness of its people, there’s the way that weird is normal and expected, there’s the relaxed feel of even the coolest places and the cluster of creativity that hovers anywhere you go in town, the kind of energy in a place where people move or stay without any practical reason, but just because they love it, the kind of city people choose to live in.  There’s the best of small-town life everywhere – whether grimy or seedy or downright provincial.

And I can try to zero in on why FoHo is my place, became the epitome of what Portland is to me – the dirt and grime and fresh paint and old-school supply stores and the people who go places not because they are hip or clean or ironic, but because it’s where you live, it’s your neighborhood and there’s a fierceness to the loyalty of that, the way that Portlanders love their independent businesses, their real bars, their quirky spaces and wobbly tables.

But ultimately there are not enough words – or the right words – to get at Portland or FoHo and what they are for me, who Portland is for me, how it feels from the inside of me.  There’s a large static-filled space in my body where Portland resonates.  Where no words are needed.  A place that Portland fills up and pushes out, out, out.  All of Portland.  I also went to my favorite Cuban restaurant and my favorite brunch spot and my favorite purveyor of local goods.  I went to new places.  I visited with old coworkers, long-time friends, met a baby whose birth I missed, devoured garden grits with my long-time ex-girlfriend and shared the kinds of updates and family news that only people who’ve known you that long can really appreciate, really understand.  I stayed with my closest Portland friend and her husband, tagged along with and dragged her everywhere.  I got a new tattoo from a friend whose skill and talent and humor I’ve already missed most fiercely twice now in California while under someone else’s needle. I wallowed in everything I love and miss about that grid of a city. I felt that static open up in me almost everywhere I went.

But I didn’t feel what I expected while doing any of this.  I had trouble even approaching – in my own mind – what it was I felt. And here is where it gets truly strange, so difficult to explain, so personal and unintentionally evasive.  Even though I was raised in California, lived most of my life here and have returned to it, indefinitely, perhaps forever – Portland is the place where my heart has felt most at home.  I ached over leaving it, even before I did, in a way I never ever did for California.  I miss so much about it in a purely physical way like I never have for any place in California.  It is my chosen native place.

I was, by many, always an interloper – not a true native for sure – but my heart knew it was home from the first instant I walked outside in the quiet of our first weekend in the state and caught the smallest of snowflakes on my tongue.  As I basked in what would turn out to be the tiniest of winter snowstorms in all my years there, as I looked up at the white-dusted trees in the center lot of our lovely North Portland neighborhood – as I did this carelessly, mindlessly – as I couldn’t be bothered to care if I looked like an idiot or a Californian or whatever.  As I felt lucky, so lucky, to have found this place, knowing so early on that it was just where I needed to be, neck bent and head back, staring up amidst the hushhush of that quiet snowstorm.

It was the exact plot of land where I belonged.  Nothing ever changed that for me, not ever.  It will always be a magical, singular, gorgeous oasis in my mind and my heart.  It is where so much of who I came to be was formed, the years living there merging all the little bits of my past and present into the woman I now know myself to be.  It is where my mind goes when I think of my home place. It will always be the point that magnetizes my heart, the point on a map I look to in order to find which direction everything else emanates from – my center.

And I love where I live now.  I am happy.  It is comfortable and striking and so so sunny.  It is home now.  And I am rooting here, re-rooting, deepening my connection to this place in a very adult way, organically and by conscious design.  But despite this all, California feels like a home away from home.  A place I have chosen to be while I know that my heart would choose elsewhere.  The flight home felt almost void of any physical senses – just a vacuum into which I was trying to throw words so I could understand what it was I felt at all.  And then I realized.  Leaving Portland after this visit felt like I was reaffirming my own exile.  That word loomed large in my mind.  I am in exile.  Of my own choosing, I know, but still.  Exile.

What had at first, so many months ago, felt like I was choosing to go to California suddenly felt like I had instead only chosen to leave Portland.  Leave all of it behind.  That life.  The chaos that erupted there.  The emotional mess I brought with me.  The places I used to go.  The person I used to be.  The people I used to love.  It felt, no matter how stunning and green and familiar, like a place tainted by the end of my time there and what it meant for me through the first half of this year, the whole city troubled with all I could no longer keep space for, all the things I couldn’t hold in my hands or my heart or my head anymore.  Like a home I could never live in again.  Sad, but slightly comforting, too.  This choice – this choice – was right.  Is right.  It’s where I need to be. It’s the place I will live, even if I never feel the kind of inexplicable love for it that I feel for my lost stumptown.

For me, Portland is that girl you meet when you’re young, who you can’t imagine not kissing.  You will kiss her, in fact, if you have to beg and beg and beg and wear her down.  And you will always love her – that tingle in your stomach that spreads into your chest and threatens to open you from the inside when you think of her, no matter how many years later, no matter how different you know she looks now – she will always be that first kiss, that surprising long sweet kiss where you knew you loved her, where you feared how much it would change you at the same time that you wrapped your arm tighter around her and reached your hand up to the nape of her neck to feel where her hair begins, to twist your finger there while you kissed her cheek.

She’s that girl.  But also the girl you have to leave. Who’s right, except. Except that she’s not anymore. Who’s the one, but can’t be. Not anymore. Who you love and love but have to live without.  And so you each move on.  You find another place to hold, to kiss, to whisper to late at night.  And she does, too.  All kinds of other people.  She lets you go.  She changes just enough to let you know she has set you free.  And you’ll try to be friends.  But it’s hard.  You can’t choose how to feel about her.  And you can’t even yet decipher exactly what that feeling is, today, right here, the visit still so vivid in your mind. You know one thing: you feel most sad about not being more sad.  It breaks your heart that you ache less for her.  She’s lovely.  Really fucking beautiful, in fact.  So beautiful sometimes it literally hurts to have left her. You think it should even hurt more, she’s so captivating.  And, but, yet.  It already hurts a little less than it did just a handful of months ago.

And so you are Napoleon on Elba.  Stuck – even if by your own decisions – on this craggy piece of land that feels so far away from there.  And you can’t deny that this rock is stunning, breathtaking in its own way.  Gaspingly gorgeous.  Just last night you looked at the rosy and cloud-hovered San Francisco skyline as you curved around on the 80 heading home at sunset and you nearly lost your breath at how not-old this view gets – at how new it is every time, no matter how many years after first seeing it, how fucking ravishing this place is, every day.  Bridges and buildings and ocean and fog and sun and clouds and wet wet air.  A pink glow rising up and out of the skyline last night – the bridge and all else in dark monochrome. The stuff of postcards and you are simply on the freeway, finishing up an errand, stunned over and over by what you see before your eyes.

This is an amazing lady you sleep with now.  Just as complicated and charming and messy and painterly.  Your new home.  Full of all that will feed you now.  Full of all your future love, your future hopes, your growing-old dreams.  So goodbye, FoHo (and with you, Portland), I will miss you.  You will change, more and always, without me.  Here is my expatriate air kiss to you.  Hang it on an antler and switch on the light of your bedside table.  You own a large part of my heart. You always will.  Even if I have learned how to be, to live, to love somewhere else.  We will catch up over and over and over.  For as long as I am able to, I will seek out the taxidermied shape of your nightlight.  Your Old Town glow and rain-soaked potholes.  Your open heart with a wry, old laugh. Your dark bars with a hippy slant and a foodie’s menu. Your painted over rust-stained awning that shields a shiny powder-coated custom bike rack.  Ex-home.  Ex Isle.  My Stella Marie, my northwestern star.

Moving Forward in Reverse: on leaving Oregon -or- this pain is not figurative

So now that it’s over, can’t we just say goodbye?
I’d like to move on and make the most of the night

Maybe a kiss before I leave you this way

Your lips are so cold, I don’t know what else to say

              – Ozzy Osbourne

And so it is.

I am no longer a resident of Oregon.

I have returned to California.  There is a lot of sun here so far.  I find I enjoy that most days.  My family is close.  I also enjoy that most days.  But Oregon is far, Portland even further.  I still do not like that.  Not on any days, really.

The days leading up to my departure feel like a ball of rubber bands rolling around in my head.  Heavy, knotted up, slightly elastic – but mostly just a jumble of once useful things that have been all wrapped up.

Two weeks before my scheduled departure, I came down with Strep Throat.  What had already started to feel  like the vast platform of time slipping out from under me began to feel like the most unusual mix of speeding forward and time lapse photography.  I was too tired to do anything.  But still I was overcome with anxiety and felt smothered by the stacks and stacks of things left to do.

I hurt too much to pack.  I was too tired to see the people I cared most about.  I missed two days of work in the crucial first week of training my replacement.  I had no choice.  By the time I went to the doctor, five days in, I felt so far behind that I postponed my move by six days.  I bought time, the time I had lost.

Quickly, through the magic of western medicine, I recovered.  I got back to seeing my friends and the people and places I would miss the most.  I got back to work.  I got back to packing.  I was cramming as much into each and every minute that I could.  I had an amazing going away party with my Oregon friends.  A generous and well-(karaoke)endowed friend hosted the event – we sang and laughed and played bingo for blow-up keytars and unicorns.  We cracked open the amazing handmade Oregon piñata Jolie had given me and people went scrambling for faux-diamond encrusted ‘brass’ knuckles and small liquor bottles and blow-up unicorns and squirt guns.  We had coconut cake that was divine and sangria and mojitos that made me a giddy mess by the end of it all.

I had my last trivia night with my viking three and ate an old people’s dinner with Jolie at the hamburger joint we went to for lunch when we first became friends so many years ago.  I went to see Crispin Glover and marveled at the oddity that is him. I laughed and laughed and worried, but mostly I tried to just laugh.

And I also woke up one morning, six days away from Departure Day, with piercing pain in my ear that became, only one day later, a perforated ear drum and then, the next day after that, an allergic reaction to the initial antibiotic made me too dizzy to turn my head and sent me reeling into nausea.  In the middle of those three days, one of my cats passed unexpectedly because of what we can only assume was a heart attack or stroke or some other internal time bomb.  I received news from Fresno of a horrific event in my mother’s home (a topic needing its own space and time to be approached or explained) that left me literally shaking my fist at the sky, like an awful cliche, asking when it would all stop, when it would all ease up and let me breathe, let me think, let me be.

In that last week before I left Oregon, what was hardest on my departure was that I was literally in pain.  All kinds of it.  I had constant piercing pain in my ear.  And my heart hurt – in so many ways.  I was crying for my cat.  He was the youngest of our pets, the only boy and the most lovable, really. I had held his stiff, cold body while sitting on the bottom step of what were once my bedroom stairs and cried.  I stayed inside while my ex buried him out back, my ear pounding too hard to be of any help, the pressure built up in my head too much to bend over, let alone even imagine exerting enough force to lift and then pierce the ground with a shovel.

I baked two dozen cupcakes from scratch and decorated them for a co-worker’s baby shower, trying hard to erase the vision of Like Water for Chocolate and the idea that these cupcakes, which should be all about joy, would be infused with sadness, or worse, stress and anxiety.  I tried to ignore the excruciating pain that was beating a fast rhythm in my ear as I made the German chocolate frosting from scratch – chopping pecans and stirring in coconut. My heart was swollen and tender already and then this violence, this expected yet still tragic outcome of my mother’s mad reckless behavior had me spun in a hundred directions.  What to do about it.  How to feel about it.  What to say about it.  It was, and is still in so many ways, indescribable.  I am still working on that part.  I was full, to the edges of my pores, with confusion and sadness and pain and worry – about moving, about my family, about the missing that was already starting to close in on me, about the now deaf right ear that was oozing and leaking and ringing and hissing and hurting, still really hurting.

A few days before I was to leave, Jolie and her husband came by to pick up the kiln we shared and all of the glass supplies.  We hefted it all up from the basement, cramming as much as we could into their Jeep.  I was having a hard time not carrying my own weight, allowing them to carry more, but the pressure in my ear was pushy and angry and would press harder against my ear the more I lifted, the more I exerted, my own pulse beating loudly in my ear with each pump of my blood.  As we stood in the living room, slowing our breathing and wiping our foreheads, Jolie and I prepared to say our goodbyes.  We are both criers, but privately.  I like to think of us as half-men in that way – stoic publicly but bumbling crybabies in our own homes.  We stood there, not sure what to say and then we hugged and said goodbye and cried.  Briefly.  And then she moved to the door and walked out to the car and I closed the door behind her.  I had said goodbyes to people I cared a lot about at my party, but I was more than a little drunk and definitely high on coconut cake.  This was the first really, really hard goodbye.  This was the true beginning of the end in Portland.

After they left, I packed up my dogs and got on the road to spend another of these last few evenings with the person I had accidentally fallen in love with – with impeccably bad timing and with overwhelmingly strong emotions. The dogs and I got on the road to make the hour drive and I tried desperately to keep it together. It was a Friday night and so there was more evening traffic than there might have been on a different night of the week and I found myself grateful for the red lights ahead of me, for the brightening and lightening of them as people braked and then accelerated.  I could focus on those lights.  I could try not to get lost in my thoughts.  I could try not to think about anything, about everything. I could try not to feel the radiating pain in my body. Or hear how mangled the music was, filtering so unevenly through my ears, or the way my own breathing sounded wrong inside my own head, as though I were forever holding a glass to my ear, eavesdropping on my own muffled thoughts.

I had said my first real goodbye and I was going to miss her like mad.  I was going to miss so much else, too, and saying goodbye to her made it real.  I was leaving.  Not just planning on leaving.  Not just waiting to leave.  I would be gone.  In a few days.  Really, in a matter of hours.  I cried.  And cried.  And dried my eyes and then cried again. I tried desperately not to cry – so that my head would hurt less, so that my eyes would not be so swollen, so when I got to Silverton I would not be a mess, so that I didn’t just go on crying for days and days.  That would come, I knew.  So stop it.

And I watched those red lights in front of me – I slowed and stopped and went and then all of it again.  I thought of my mother and whether I needed to see her when I got to California.  Yes, I decided. And so I cried some more.  I stopped and dried  my eyes and focused on the road.  I thought of my friends and this love and being so far away from it all.  I cried.  And stopped.  I changed the cotton ball in my ear more times than I could count in that time and looked at the bag of cotton balls on the passenger seat full of clean cotton balls, pulled apart into neat little halves so that they would tuck into my ear just so, and looked at the cup in my cup holder that held the ones I would need to throw out. It was disgusting and I was disgusted by it.  I was leaking, making a mess of things, trying to stopper myself like a leaky pipe.

I started to feel that my pain, my heart and brain and soul pain, my sadness over needing to leave Portland had come to life in my body and had ruptured my ear, was literally oozing from me, seeping from my head, forcing me to see it and deal with it and live with it.  I was hurting.  For real.  With injuries doctors could measure.  I was waking up over and over to pain – enough that I would rifle through the refrigerator in the wee hours of the morning to find anything to eat so that I could take one more ibuprofen, one more Tylenol with codeine.  My body was railing against me, fighting me, making this all as impossibly hard as it could.  This pain was stealing my romantic notion of what it would mean to leave.  My body was screaming at me, throbbing at me, exploding with its refusal to allow it to be easy.

I spent my last week not being heard – my own voice huge in my head, but small and almost invisible to everyone else.  I spent that last week only half hearing the people around me.  Even when I turned my ‘good ear’ to them, even when I said (often in my best old man voice) ‘eh?’.  It was as though they were already half gone.  I was already half gone.  The gap between us already widening even as I sat next to them.  Even as we shared a meal.  Even as we laid on the couch together and stayed awake just so as not to lose the night to sleep.

Leaving, really leaving, was hard.  Almost impossible.  I bought myself one extra day in Oregon – my ear throbbing and keeping me awake and even more so after packing up all of my belongings and trying to help carry them out to the POD. And so, when the opportunity presented itself, I hung on for one more night. I spent one last, unexpected evening in Silverton –  allowed myself twenty-four hours of nothing to do but be. It was the most perfect standstill in the middle of the chaos and I didn’t want it to end.

When it came time to leave the next morning, after an excruciating and nearly silent goodbye only an hour before, it was just me and my dogs standing in the middle of a house that was not ours but had become quickly familiar.  I gathered our stuff.  I rested my bag of cotton balls on the passenger seat and made sure everything was in the car.  I went back in for the dogs and I said through sobs – to the air, to the walls, to myself, in the muffled way I now heard my own voice – why am I doing this? Why?


Eventually, in what was only minutes, really, but felt like more – I was on the road.  I was cruising south on I-5 heading for California.  It was a bright-blue-sky-in-Oregon kind of day and I tried hard not to cry.  I changed out my cotton ball a couple of times and then pulled it out.  My ear did what it had every time I had done this in the last few days – it crackled and picked up sounds at varying volumes – giving the impression that I had a clicking gremlin in my right ear.  Like feedback from my own brain. It was maddening and disorienting, but not so painful anymore. It was Son of Sam annoying yet fascinating in its strangeness.

And I had stopped oozing.  Almost completely.  I still couldn’t hear and the pain was still there, but I could feel it sloping down into discomfort, into doesn’t this feel weird, into dammit I wish I could hear.  My ear seemed to be crossing over, shifting into healing, into something (hopefully) closer to normal as I moved further and further away from the life I had. I thought Here I am.  Here I go.  Here I come.

I held it together, mostly.  I cried.  I certainly did.  But not as much as I thought I might.  I had suffered the pain of leaving, I was still suffering it, but not just with tears.  Maybe I was just too worn out for all that superfluous crying.  Maybe I had leaked too much to cry.  But when I saw the sign that says Oregon thanks you – Come back soon, when I saw those words against that kelly green state silhouette, I melted.  I sobbed and sobbed and felt the weight of my next visit actually being a visit.  I had left.  Almost a decade of my life on the other side of that sign.  A lot of life.  A whole, complete, finished chapter.  A person in a place that is now past.

I’ll be back soon, I told myself.  I’ll visit so often it won’t even feel like I left, I tried to tell myself.  But all I had were tears – big sobbing ones.  And then I saw the checkpoint just across the state line.  I had forgotten about it.  So I dried up, stopped pouring out tears and then I was simply ushered through.  Can’t you see I’m dying here? I thought melodramatically.  I was, in reality, glad they didn’t notice or care.

Suck it up, Californian.  This is where you are.  And it is bittersweet. It is lovely and tart and right where you belong even if you want to be somewhere else at the same time and that is impossible.  You have family shit to deal with and a business to start and a home to find and three small boys to hold who will soon, before you even know it, be way too gangly and long to fit on your lap, and eventually, too old and cool to love you so obviously and affectionately.  So suck it up.  More than that – enjoy it. This is home.  Now.  Here.

I’ve come back to you, California.  Please don’t hold a grudge. I love you, too, even if I love Oregon.  You are both my tender-hearted loves – one sun and one rain, one blue and white and one green and gray.  I love you both, individually, even while I wish that, through magic and conjuring and pure desire, I could meld you into my perfect perfect place. My love for Oregon hit me so hard before I left that my ear drum exploded.  Please be nice, for now, my home state.  I can’t take anymore pain. I can’t afford anymore open wounds. I am here now, almost healed, but still healing. Take care, California.  Be kind.

Another Year, Another Foggy Forecast

All photos in this post by Jolie Griffin

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity . . .
 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
                         – T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding I & II)

Here it is: 2011.  2010 is gone . . . even though everything that happened in that upturned year of my life is still holding me afloat in this new one.  Whether afloat is a sign of surviving or a sign of still being kicked around by the tide is a matter of moment by moment opinion.  I am half gone from this city I love, half done with things I should have lined up or finished weeks ago, half submerged in a whole new unknown job, foot half out the door of the one here in Portland, half-insane for allowing myself to fall in love in a time marked only by departure and distance, half-cocked in this half-packed house that is driving one of my dogs into full-blown anxiety. I have half a dozen half-finished blog posts because I can’t seem to sit long enough to finish any given one – my mind a half-blown tool scattered too wide.  I am more than half happy and more than half sad and am unable to figure out how both of those things can be true – but find I am mostly unwilling to try too hard to unpack that puzzle. I am both. I just am. In nearly overwhelming amounts.

But I am here: standing, living, falling when I thought maybe I could no longer find that place, grieving so many things that might not even deserve to be grieved but that gently break my heart nonetheless.  My sister is alive and learning how to live.  My family is, mostly, in tact and pulling together, readying for a geography that feels a lot like love. I have so many, many friends who are each such crazy, loving, reachable people that I sometimes dizzy with the thought of all of them – swaying closer, swaying further, but always orbiting and circling and checking in.  I have so many people that I don’t know what to do with my love for them – but even if nearly overcome by it, will not bear the giving up of them in any way except the most necessary – a move away from a handful of people who have been my most tapped touchstones, my sturdiest anchors when I was seasick and green.  The ones who help me through even when they don’t lend an ear, even when I don’t ask them to, even when they have no idea that they are helping – by being, by caring, by existing.  I am the most broke I have been in a long, long time and yet I don’t, in the most cliche of ways, feel poor.

Maybe because there is too much going on, too much in my brain, too much loss and love (new and old and vanishing) in my heart . . . maybe because of all this, I let midnight on the 31st pass without my usual thoughtful reflection of the year that came before and the intentional framing of how I would face the next one. A tried and true ritual where I pause to orient myself, to understand, to make sense and then turn to face the new year. Probably because this is all I have done in the last year I didn’t even think to stop, to pause and reflect, during those last few days of December.  Perhaps I have done so much of that thinking and crying and wishing and planning and mourning so that all I have left to do is step into this year. Walk into it. As bravely and as fearlessly and as boldly as I can.  I have never been one for lukewarm emotions or lukewarm intentions – so here I am 2011.  Don’t do me wrong.  I will wear you out with fun if you let me. I will love you like mad if you just treat me right.  Listen to Pat Benatar.  She is wiser than you might know.

Last week, I drove past the patch of land that was my cafe and was taken back, physically and emotionally, to last January.  To holding the drill in my hand and setting it on counter-clockwise and reversing every 2″ wood screw out of the back wall, pulling apart the intricately puzzled pieces of doors. To climbing up on the step ladder to reach the pieces from the top of the dividing wall whose screws were stripped.  To taking the claw end of the hammer and leveraging myself, carefully, balanced precariously on a thin strip of flimsy metal, slowly ripping each wooden piece from the frame.  I could feel the weighing out of each item – to keep, to sell, to give away.  Each thing a specific memory – not simply a pale green demitasse, but the exact one I chose, bought and unpacked and washed and placed beneath a portafilter spout to watch for the perfect wobbly stream of espresso and crema – a cream tinged deep amber dancing against the heat and water and air. I could feel the exact pounds of each table as my last trusty barista and I carried them out to the sidewalk and set up to sell it all off – this place I had made and was only a little sad to leave.

I remembered feeling the weight of it, even then.  The significance of that change – pulling apart what I had made and what had failed – had failed to succeed, to thrive, to make me happy, to give me the freedom I wanted.  I knew, in every dismantling moment, that I was in the middle of an enormous shift in my life.  I was making decisions, I was making changes, I was crafting a whole new life.  I knew what I was doing and thought I knew, mostly, what was to come.  

But I didn’t.  I had no idea. Not a clue.  Events unfolded, moments happened, that flipped everything upside down and sent me sailing through the kind of choices that leave nothing unturned.  I thought of that woman, poised to change her life, and almost laughed at how little she imagined she was about to change.  I laugh at how half-ass that kind of change would have been compared to the actual tumbling of 2010 as it wore away the outer layer of pretty much everything I thought I knew. The skin rashing slide against the pavement of last year’s circumstances. The turmoil about to push that woman through months and months of gut wrenching choices.

She was ready.  For what she didn’t even know was coming.  

So I give up, this year, on guessing what will be next year. I feel much the same this January as I did last.  A lot of the very same motions as I pack up my house and my memories and my stuff – touching it all and remembering so much more than I may want to in any given moment. I stop myself when I start to imagine – as I did exactly one year ago – that the beginning of this year will be rough, will mean changes and sadness and loss, but also gain and intention and love. Yes – the beginning will surely mean all of those things.  But as to what else?  I can’t know.  And I can’t bear to think it will be a repeat of 2010 in any significant way, but I will sail forward into that possibility, unlocked.  I will walk forward – toward it – and trust that 2011 will at least be quieter.  Will at least be simpler, even if only slightly.  Will at least be as much laughing as I somehow fit into that treacherous year of my life that has finally ended. I am a weather vane without direction, but I can sway and point and shift.  I am ready.  For whatever.  

 

So here’s a toast to this new year:

May you laugh with me or at me or next to me.  May we cry only when it’s really necessary and then, as often as possible, together – whether in print or in spirit or holding each other through sobs.  May we drink until our toes hurt but never ever have to hold each other’s hair back – because we are, really, way too old for that.  But may we never feel so old that we forget who we were and who we can always be – those girls, those boys, those children who railed against the world, but trusted each other implicitly – with our lives, with our hearts and with our bodies.  May we close the gaps time has created and help each other stitch the cuts that appear this year, suture them for each other when it can’t be done ourselves, gently press the skin together and hold it there to make the smallest, faintest scar possible.  May we love – long and hard and fast – with all of the weight we can give it.  May we live – another year, another ring beneath our bark, another line on our face, our flesh another inch closer to the ground.  

Raise a glass to yourself – raise it to your people – raise it to the world that can not stop spinning.  Raise it to the difference you have made for me – last year and probably many before. To the difference you will surely make for me this year and so, so many more to come. Here we are, 2011. Salud. 

La la la la la la la la . . . all of it was made for you and me.

I am the passenger
and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky
You know, it looks so good tonight.
                                      – Iggy Pop & Ricky Gardiner

I am of the opinion that even when life is at its shittiest, it is also beautiful and full of moments that demand our attention, that remind us of all the love around us. Even when everything seems to be at ends, falling apart, maybe disintegrating right in front of you, when you are least sure of anything in your life – if you’ve done things right, if you’ve loved the people around you and not severed all ties, then there is so much around you to be grateful for, so many lovely moments to look at, to be conscious of as they happen.  It is definitely this belief, more than anything else, that has kept me from sliding down that deep slope of sadness that certain times of my life have seemed to push me toward. The people in my life (some gone, some still here, some destined to be in and out of my life over and over) are amazing, caring, loving, hilarious and masterful distractors as well as patient and compassionate listeners.

I have been overwhelmed lately, over and over, by the luck I have in amassing this motley bunch of people around me.  Sometimes it feels like no matter where I turn there is someone who makes my life better – like I have spokes shooting out from all around me connecting me to a large circle of fun and joy and love that is spinning around us all, rotating and turning and turning and turning whether we notice it there or not. It is always the small moments that remind me of this – an unexpected laugh in the middle of a tense moment, a joke shared, a small toast among friends or the head shaking of a friend who can’t believe you will still do that, the undeserved joy of a nephew’s smile for no other reason than you appeared right in front of him.  Here are a few of the recent moments that make me grateful for my people, my family (by blood or by heart) – who bring me joy and break the fall when the world slides out from under me. A series of brief odes to these great folks, big and small.

******

Seeing my nephews’ faces peer through the wavy glass of their entry way – their toes stretched to raise their faces high enough to see – and then my name (missing a syllable, vowels shoved together with love) loud and animated as their front door swings open.  Their arms around me, one set around my waist, one set around my legs, making it hard for me to walk.  Having to tell them to wait while I hug the rest of the family.  Sitting on the floor to watch the end of a movie with them, B sprawled out in front of me on his belly while I hold his ankles and wiggle his legs around.  His giggle.  The look backward when I stop and the scoot, scoot back so his feet are resting on my leg, skin to skin, heaven. Filling my plate with homemade tri-tip and pilaf, knowing that the whole family was waiting there for me, post-work, surely tired, but ready for a late dinner and the chaos of three or four conversations going all at once, intertwining and overlapping and loud.

Picking up B and taking him to pick up N from Kindergarten.  Hearing N yell, there’s my auntie as we walk up, hand in hand.  Ice cream with my boys, their faces a horrid mess, N slamming his cup up into his face and reeling backward with laughter. Dancing spastically in the car, N slowing his moves to a slow robot to make me laugh. Spending the afternoon with my brother and his wife.  Holding little N while we all talk about big stuff and little stuff.  Knowing this will happen more and more often as the miles between us shrink.

An evening spent with an old friend, her son and my dogs.  Seeing her son bounce around the house, excited to see me even though I am so new to him, looking at his contagious smile – so wide and energetic.  Watching old videos we haven’t seen in fifteen years (if ever at all) and remembering that then, like now, was beautiful and awful and hysterical in almost all senses of that word. Talking and talking until you realize it’s almost five in the morning, like we are not almost forty, but maybe almost twenty, all things so much like they ever were despite ages and ages of life happening for each of us during the lost years of our friendship.  Feeling content, knowing that some people just are your friends, for no good reason, for no thing you’ve done, maybe just because the universe keeps you connected and you can fuck it up, but you can keep making it work, too.

Starting a roller derby class with a far more fierce friend who  may actually join a team someday.  Falling and lagging and trying and trying until we are so sore even talking seems to hurt.  Being aware amidst all the pain that these are moments we will always be able to laugh about, to relive, time spent together before we live so far apart, before it gets even harder to find time together.  Her split chin and my sweaty, sweaty face.  Our energized voices talking rapidly as we exit, the messages back and forth the next week about the pain, the pain, ohmygawd the pain. Joking about the teacher and her topless rollerskating banjo playing dreams.  Stories we could not have made up but will retell over and over.

Watching N miss a soccer goal because he sees me walk up and he waves, a smile spreading across his face and even though his dad and his coach tell him to watch the ball, he watches me.  Knowing I should feel a little bad about that, but only feeling the love, the certainty that what I am doing with my life is right, right there in that wide grin.  Kicking a soccer ball on the edge of the field with B, the sound of his giggle, both deep and high pitched all at once, when he kicks it at me and I miss it. Getting to go to the pumpkin patch with everyone, watching B fearlessly climb up the bounce slide steps – slipping more than once the first time, but never hesitating, just going and going and pushing forward – his bravado even at such a young age so inspiring.  Watching him adjust his second climb up to avoid any slips, seeing the little boy who chickened out watch him and then make it up himself, with N cheering them both on from above. Their stretched out, laughing, smiling faces flying down the slide.

A happy hour event with one of my closest friends, refusing to miss her even though soon we will not live in the same city, or even the same state.  Commiserating over work and bosses and other friends. Laughing at each other that we need pictures of our drinks before we can drink them, admiring her skills at staging the photograph and enjoying even that lag in time between getting the drink and drinking it. Losing track of time, the windows darkening and a candle lit while we talk over the arm that reaches in, ignoring the insanely loud atmosphere of the bar to tell stories and make plans and relax in a small pocket of time set aside for nothing else but hanging out, nothing else but this.

An insane evening on a school bus with this friend and her husband, meeting another friend of theirs for the first time, wearing plastic viking hats and clip-on mustaches and laughing until my eyelids hurt.  Knowing that there’s nowhere else I would rather be in that moment and with no one else.  Dancing and shit-talking and trying to think through the fun to come up with trivia answers.  Wowing them with the speed and efficiency I can create a Snookie bump, without a mirror, without a brush, on a moving bus at midnight – such skills to impress them with.  Seeing the startled shock on their faces when I quickly stand up at one bar, take off my shoes and threaten to beat them all with my shoes after being called a killjoy. Falling into such deep, hysterical laughter by the end of the night that I can’t do anything but form short sentences.  Causing one friend to repeatedly fall apart with just one simple gesture acted out over and over.  It never getting old, for either of us.

Deciding to attend a concert, at the last minute, with friends who used to be employees, but from the beginning were much more than that.  Feeling giddy from the moment they get in the car, knowing that dorking out is always the goal, but so is catching up and talking about the real stuff.  Talking so fast, over each other, because we all have so much to say and never enough time.  Shared glances that require no words when we see way too many pairs of shiny spandex leggings and braided headbands worn across the forehead.  The facial-expression-shorthand of women who had to communicate about customers without saying a word.  Plotting with the only other women in the world, that I know, who are excited about dressing up like Chuck Finley in all of his 70’s mustached glory.  Feeling alive and independent and capable of creating this whole new life I have set up for myself to invent.

Making a rollerskating date with a college friend who has always been there, to pick me up or help me through, and then unexpectedly finding a few extra hours to meet for breakfast the day before we were to skate.  Lounging through breakfast, talking and talking about roller derby and writing and family without feeling time rushing by, without feeling like I need to run off to the next place.  Commiserating over being almost forty and entertaining the notion of roller derby, of realizing that we are not old, neither of us, and we will not act old. Enjoying eggs and potatoes and coffee and the company that feels so easy and comfortable and peaceful.

An unexpected visit, a short amount of stolen hours with someone I didn’t expect to see anytime soon.  Relishing the time trapped between two days, trapped between being with and being without, knowing that soon I will not see this person very much if at all and refusing to be sad about that in the moment.  Both of us laughing at my dog chasing her own tail, startled by her own butt, spinning and spinning and spinning.  Both of us enamored of my littlest dog, her fraggle face and monkey belly, her wide eyes lit up and her ears back. Locking out the sadness that will come from missing this person even the next day to just be there, laughing and smiling and submerged in the minutes that are passing, refusing to be sad before it is time, refusing to think too much about that right then. Allowing myself these moments when they happen, without reserve and without overthinking.

Photo by Cesy Mitchell

An elaborate performance by N and I while visiting my sister at her ‘camp’, where she is ‘camping’ for a very long time.  A ridiculously costumed, unrehearsed free-style rap performance to brighten my sister’s birthday. Helping N into the costume in my sister’s room as he can hardly talk for the giggling.  Blowing up the inflatable ring for his Rap is Phat rapper costume.  His pursed lip smile, when he tries not to smile, his dimples coming out full force when he does this.  This dimpled, pursed lip face as we walk out of her room and down to where the family is barbecuing. The instant change in his stature as he approaches them, the character taking over his body, a swagger falling into step.  My heart swelling when some strangers walk by and look, but he keeps on rapping, keeps on beatboxxing, keeps on dorking out.  His hug and B’s hug when I have to say goodbye only a couple of hours later.  That was awesome, Dann-a, as we wave goodbye. My sister’s smile in the middle of all this other stuff. Wrapping my arms around her because I can.  Holding her that extra minute – so grateful for her and my brother, my left and right side, the family that is meant to last with you into old age

Spending an evening out with other friends, celebrating a birthday, so much laughing that my voice begins to give. Friends who know me as the girl who will do almost anything for a laugh, without fear of looking the fool, who don’t seem at all surprised that I still act like this at almost forty, even with a camera toting friend in tow, even in the age of Facebook and instant mass humiliation (but you have to be embarrassed to be humiliated, right?).  Who don’t seem at all surprised when I climb on a dumpster or pull wigs out of my trunk or climb on top of my car. Who know I’m not drunk, know that I don’t need to be drunk to do these things.  I only need an opportunity and an audience.  I only need to know you will laugh – and that so will I.

Photo by Jennifer Majarian

Driving home way too late, way past when I should have been too tired to function but was propelled forward by the rare moment in time of us all together.  Driving home and consciously aware (for what might be the hundredth time in the last few months) that I am a lucky, lucky girl to know so many people who know me, really know me, and still they love me.  Still they join in and participate and revel in the hours we can find to be together.  Who will also be there when I need them, show up for the shit, too, be there to hand me a tissue to dry my eyes or open their doors even if I am carrying a suitcase and a devastated look. Countless faces and eyes and arms to hug me, to push me into a silly situation, to smile at me and make me laugh even when, especially when, there seems little to laugh at.  Amazement at finding myself standing here, in the middle of this circle, of people who don’t even all know each other, but still circle around me, magically present, appreciated and so valuable, so needed and so loved. They are all certainly my bright in a hollow sky and they all look so good to me tonight, and every night.

No Time Between, none at all: Barton Street & Beyond

I spent a whirlwind two days in Fresno last week, bookended by evenings in San Francisco and Oakland, reconnecting with folks who were lost to me less than a year ago.  Last year at this time, my life and the people gathered around me were vastly different and both where I am now and where I was then are/were wonderful and stressful and beautiful and difficult. I could never have seen then what exactly right now would look like, let alone get anywhere near how it feels – this airy, heart-swollen feeling. It sounds decidedly non-romantic and anti-sentimental to say the truth – that Facebook is responsible for most of it.

Facebook has changed my life in numerous ways – and depending on who you ask, they will see it as either positive or negative – but for me they are all positive in that the train is moving perpetually forward and whether you hold on or jump off is all you can decide.  There are bombs (of the small and medium variety) that Facebook has dropped in my life that I still am not ready to write about (not yet, not really) and so someday I will work those out, too, and perhaps I will change my opinion.  But today, coming down off of what I can only call a love hangover, I feel blessed to be in an age  – and at an age – where I can find old friends and they can find me and we can appreciate what it is we’ve found: a collective memory that is larger than any one of us alone.

I read a very brief book review of Jennifer Egan’s new novel The Keep where the reviewer makes a statement that in this age of social networking, losing touch is becoming a thing of the past.  This phrase kept ricocheting in my head all weekend as everyone marveled at how quickly we all came together and as we each sat stunned by the voodoo of our own presence among the group. I am of a generation that knows the pain (and sometimes relief) of moving and moving and eventually phone numbers are changed and jobs are changed and parties are moved and you have suddenly and irrevocably lost touch with someone you could not have imagined spending a whole week without in what feels like only months before.  There is a comfort in that possibility – the option of being gone – lord knows I have used it to escape a love I could not have otherwise forced myself to part from – more than once.  Unlisted, unseen, unfound.  Until Facebook. And while sometimes a face pops up on the screen, or in your friend requests, that startles you, makes you long again for the distance of the white pages and a disconnected number – mostly, I find moments of goosebumps and anticipation as another long lost friend magically, without warning and in full color glory, stares back at me asking to be my friend again.

The trickling in of these old childhood friends has spanned itself over the last ten months and so it has been far from overwhelming – despite the turmoil of this year and the way that rediscovering my love for and from these people has contributed to an earth-moving, balance shifting discombobulation –  it has both spun me around and churned me through this time of break-up. Each visit home over the last seven months has given me a chance to see people who knew me at a time that was specific and crucial and what I can now see as the wire cage the rest of my self- soul and heart and mind and body – that the rest of my life has been sculpted over.  Each time, each person, has felt like a gift, or better yet – like a long lost favorite t-shirt you find, by happenstance, has been at the back of your drawer all these years.  It looks the same, it feels the same and it fits the same.

I have amazing friends I have made throughout my adult years – friends who have known me through college and grad school and job changes and marital problems and who are here, day by day, to help me through the day to day.  And I love them. I could not imagine life without them.

This visit, though, was singularly focused and without distraction, without other responsibilities or time-pulls – it was all about reconnecting with the people who spent time at the same high school, who ditched and drank and laughed and sobbed with me. There is something remarkable about the people who knew you when – when you were a child, when you thought you weren’t, when you thought you might die if he doesn’t call, when you might have died because you took too much, when you acted recklessly and rashly to make your friends laugh and to know that you were alive, when you drank so much or pushed yourself too far just to see if you would die.  I’m sure not everyone pushed themselves and shoved at the limits as much as we did.  And I know that countless others shoved even harder.  But we were reckless.  We were heady with rebellion and distress.  We were angry and we were also funny and kind and full of love.  As a group, we can piece together a history that no one of us can remember alone.

I had high hopes for the weekend.  I was fully prepared to be let down, at least a little (and can’t believe that I wasn’t, not at all). We planned it as an anti-reunion in the style of a real reunion.  We plotted and planned and made it all happen.  The core of us met before the first gathering of the day at the sidewalk just outside our school where we stood for so many thousands of hours that it sometimes surprises me that our footprints are not etched into the concrete.  We stood, sat, slept and passed out on that sidewalk.  We smoked and drank and ate Twix bars on that sidewalk.  We scratched our names into the two blocks of wet cement that popped up like beacons to our defacing hearts in 1988.  We stared at those etched in names and symbols as our older selves – transported back to then, still standing hazily in now trying to remember the details.

Planning to meet around noon outside in July in Fresno was in a lot of ways a bad idea.  But it was the time we had and so slowly, cars started arriving. The people who lived across the street eyed us occasionally as we gathered with hoots and hollers and hugs and began to amass on Barton Street. We were sweating and trying to hide from the sun. We were giddy and amped up and on edge. Some of these people I have seen in the last few months, but some I had not.  And I surprised even myself when I broke down and wept as I walked up to a friend I had not seen in at least fifteen years.  We hugged and cried and I realized in that exact moment how much I had missed her, even more than I knew. This happened again and again.

People showed up for the various events of the day that I didn’t even know others of us were still in touch with.  We frantically phoned another friend that I had not realized wasn’t invited because I had mistakenly thought he was someone I liked much less – the real names behind the names we called each other lost in time, lost in my grown-up brain.  Families arrived – fully formed human children trailing behind these people I knew at the same ages – and I was struck by how much we are all still the same despite all evidence to the contrary – even walking, talking evidence that filled up chairs and ate red velvet cake.

The thing about the whole day, the whole weekend, was that all of these people are different – how can we not be? – but we are all still the same.  We are all still the people who made fun of each other and egged each other on and played jokes on each other.  And the same people who always took the call, who walked or drove or biked to your house when you needed them, who dropped everything and risked suspension, detention, endless grounding to be there for you.  We were young and old and ageless as we floated in the pool or reenacted ridiculous YouTube dances or tried to sneak obscene photos of each other at the bar or sang so hard our legs hurt.

I don’t know that I could have loved these people any more in 1988, 1990 or 1992 than I did that weekend  (and do right now as my heart aches, in the best of ways, writing this).  My love, in fact, feels deeper because I know not only what we all lost when we split apart, but what we’ve found.  One friend said she feels like she has found her whole childhood and I can’t disagree.  I feel like I have found a lot of faith in the longevity and the elasticity of human love and friendship.  Some of us just lost touch, but some of us weathered all sorts of storms together until there was the one we could not make it through.  Some of us struggled alone and together until we turned around and didn’t quite know how we had ended up so far apart. Yet, on that uncomfortably hot weekend in July, we were all there and open and giving and grateful.

I read a blog today by Betsy & Iya about a college friend’s memorial service and she wrote about how her friend’s mother spoke of the fact that 100 things happen in any one day and 99 of them are good, but we only see the one that is not.  Betsy wrote about wanting to focus on those 99 things every day and the warmth and love she felt among friends while in LA for the memorial.  Sitting in the pool or staying up late talking to friends and fighting off sleep because it meant this would all end, I couldn’t see anything but that 99 – 99 separate joys lit up and spinning around in front of me, refusing to be missed.  99 lovely promises of the kind of love that hibernates and hides away, but is always there and comes back to you, in the most surprising of ways.

When we were fourteen or eighteen or twenty-two – we could not have predicted how this would happen and yet it has and now will happen again. In the time of twenty foot tangled up phone cords and miraculous beeping pagers so you could stay in touch away from home and big, heavy phone books – we could never have predicted any way to stay in touch except the old fashioned way of parents who never move. For all that can be said of the depersonalization of the computer age and the ways that we create simulated selves and images that are what we want to be, not who we are – there is a more powerful truth for me: this magic of pixels and electricity and light has brought back to me my youth – joyous and tragic and really fucked up and hysterical. Thank you Facebook, for bringing me gifts that I had no idea I wanted (& needed) so badly.  Thank you friends, for being the kind of people I always knew you were – smart and generous and so unbelievably hilarious.  I have much love for my posse – te quiero por vida y con todo mi corazón. De verdad.