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One of my biggest fears when J and I broke up—and okay, always, if I’m honest—was that I was going to be “alone forever.” It’s been my go-to answer to the “What are you afraid of?” line of questioning for a long time now. Those are pretty scary words, alone forever.
But to fear forever aloneness is to see only half of the story.
I’ve driven in the pouring rain, splashed through a submerged downtown, rediscovered the shops in old town, and joined a new bible study. I took an Amtrak adventure, got lost in the outlets (figuratively—with me it’s worth clarifying, trust me), ate scungili, and toasted a departing colleague well past last call. I’ve gone to sushi dinners, shopping nights, and met Laura Bush (who is, in fact, just as adorable in person. She looked right at me and said, “nice to see you!” Politics aside, I’m in love, people; it’s official).
I was in the back of a cab with a friend of mine Saturday night, on the way to a hookah bar, when I started adducing all that my life has become over this last month. (A hookah bar! An entirely enjoyable experience, somewhat unexpectedly; highly recommended, with the right friends). That’s really what it all comes down to, the friends. I get by with a little help from my friends, et cetera.
When I moved here, I had exactly two people to call on. I still know them, but neither is in the circle of my people. I have a circle now. Sometimes I’m still amazed that this happened; that I made friends, real friends, all on my own. I have been so well taken care of.
Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. A year ago I was the girl killing yeast in her boyfriend’s apartment, a botched challah, an empty kitchen, and a complacent boyfriend in the next room her companions. Tonight she’s back, a little bit reborn, and ready to start fresh.
I read my horoscope every day on my commute in. I’ll skim the headlines, then skip right there, conveniently located on the comics page. Real news depresses me, what can I say. That and my train ride’s so short; why start what can’t be finished? (All ways, of course, for me to say this: I’m smart! Really! I just like the fluff).
Yesterday, the horoscope sounded oddly familiar. Eh, I thought, probably just similar wording. Today, though, it happened again. Déjà vu on the blue line to largo; words from months ago resurfacing as again, it tells me, “you can provide someone with a shoulder to lean on—but who is going to be there when you need someone?” Now that’s just sad. And mean, since I know I’ve read it before. Stupid Express and your stupid recycling horoscopes.
I’ve been on a “look out for signs and what they might mean” kick recently. Mostly, I suspect, because I borrowed Serendipity from the library, and have been watching bits of it as I get ready each morning. I am ridiculously influenced and easily swayed.
Oh god. Just as I wrote that, a leaf fell off of my (surely dying) orchid. Or remains-of-orchid. Or something. A source sent me two orchid plants, unfortunately timed to arrive the Friday before Mother’s Day. Everyone in the office was all, oooh, fedexed flowers! Is there something we don’t know, magda? And all suspicious looks were directed to my stomach for weeks afterward.
The plants have faired poorly. They started out beautiful, of course, but now? One has (thanks to that last death) but two leaves remaining. The other, three and a little stump of a stem. I think I just need to chuck them, and look for something hardier. But they’re hanging on!
It is now 9.30, and the work I’ve done today past check my e-mail totals a whopping ZERO. Yet no one else on my staff is even in. Maybe fate is telling me that it’s time for recess, or that I really should have slept in. Or maybe I should just get to work. That’s the trouble with fate; the signs are always so easy to manipulate.
I was standing in the damp underground of the Rosslyn metro tonight, one girl among a sea of faces standing around, absorbed in a paper, plugged into an ipod, absorbed in a novel—howsoever superficially—to pass the orange-illuminated minutes. I’m no stranger to the Rosslyn metro; it was an old friend the nights I’d train out to J’s place. Fourteen minutes here, twelve there; an hour later, I’d arrive, and our night would begin. So many of my thoughts those concrete walls have silently witnessed. So many idle moments, so many fleeting visions of where it was all going.
When the train came, I boarded; sitting backwards, I headed south. Away. Home.
Predictably, things are just as I’d left them when I snap on the lights. Illuminating the chaos, really; the dishes are still in the sink, and my running shoes are still looking mournfully up at me from the entry (better luck tomorrow, kids).
I would love to be Samantha Stevens.
Yes, but no, really; I’d like to see the instant order, but there’s something really beautiful about the unknown. About finding the path, and making it all work out, the mortal way.
The tides are changing. My polar fleece came off the hook where it’s hung since, oh, April tonight. A hug from a far-away place as I walked down the street to the Whole Foods, recycled fiber bag (of course) in tow. Clementines—Seedless Beauties! A nice thought, but important always to remember that without seeds—seeds somewhere, at least one—beauty would, in fact, be impossible.
There’s something very soothing about the tip-tap of the keyboard, when the words just come and the page fills up. But there’s something very frustrating when, at the end of it all, you have to scrap it because it turns out it’s completely redundant and the people down the hall already wrote it, but your bosses hate each other so there’s zero coordination and all your work is for naught, and sorry, people I interviewed, but I guess I won’t be needing your comments after all, and sorry, people I courted into press admission for a hearing Monday, but it turns out I was never actually on the case. [Breathe].
[Start over].
One of the girls on our floor quit the company yesterday, and I can’t help but feel jealous. We had a little going-away party; a crepe paper good-luck event where everyone was furtively trying to contain their envy, the awkwardness at being left behind, within the confines of a donut on a paper plate. It was almost icy, the temperature in there, even though everyone was all smiles and best wishes.
She’s taken a job in doc review; “off to the jungle,” she said. I’ve always been of the impression that doc review is less a jungle, more a wasteland; an isolated world where lawyers go to die or, worse, wish for death. I hear it’s better now than it was when our law professors were associates. Oh, the stories they told of sitting in dank basements, sorting through boxes and boxes of discovery documents. Up hill both ways, etc., but in many ways it seemed the paradox rang a bit true. The eye strain, the boredom, the terribleness that is reviewing thousands of subpoenaed e-mails, business plans, memoranda; I can’t even imagine. It’s all electronic now, of course, and the pay is, all things considered, superior. But still. She’ll be working as a temp of sorts, so she won’t even get the satisfaction an associate would of knowing what happens at the end of it all; how the case ultimately plays out. No love!
We went out for drinks last night to celebrate, and forgot somewhere along the way that she was the only one who didn’t have to make an appearance at 9am. She said she wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been happy for a long time; she said she’d rather do gruntwork in the underbelly of a lawfirm for awhile than stay on with something that made her so miserable. I understood exactly what she meant, and I wish her all the best. It’s not a move I’ll be making—some misery is just worth suffering through—but I felt where she was coming from.
Honestly, I kind of wish it was me who was getting out of here, me who everyone was coming to to congratulate on her jailbreak.
I get frustrated here a lot, and I could spend the rest of the evening listing out the things I’d change if I could. But I find ways of being amused. I enjoy and exploit my flexibility (hello, blog, maybe I’ll write today instead of being productive). I have the luxury of closing out my browser, turning off the light, and really truly leaving for the evening, taking every weekend knowing that work won’t come near my radar. I can do things like hop a train to the center of our fair Commonwealth, meet a friend I feel I’ve known forever, and just leave it all behind.
Plus, if I was off doing doc review, would I have been able to causally slip a pen into my boss’ drawer when I was over there dropping off an assignment? A pen that is shiny and metallic and says in big letters NAUGHTY GIRL PARTIES! 866-NAWT-GRL ?
Yeah. I didn’t think so.
I was sitting at Logan Airport last night, exhausting the numbers in my cell phone and filling up voicemailboxes the nation over, when I thought hmm, maybe I’ll call J. Just to say hi. Because I do kind of miss him, and he might answer, and it’s just a phone call, right?
This is the point in the story where you’re supposed to jump out and say No! Remove that finger from the “send”! Go look at the shops; grab a beer because they have Sam Adams Oktoberfest on tap again; change into your pajamas or something. Thing is, I’d done all of these things. The flight that was supposed to depart at 6.45? We boarded at 9.15. All kinds of awesome.
J didn’t answer. A close call; a one-time pass to the Being Stupid show. I knew it was a bad idea when I pulled the trigger, but it was one of those deliciously bad things that you just somehow are sure won’t be all that bad so long as it’s you who’s doing the doing. Whew, I said, a narrow miss. And then I blew it all to nothing by answering when he called back, 20 minutes later. I regaled him with tales of my weekend, and my delay, and everything worth saying that no, I should absolutely not be saying to him. Not anymore. Thing is, I know I’m stronger than that. I wasn’t even that bored.
It went the predictable course; he was so glad to hear to hear from me, and now he thinks maybe things might work out after all. Magda: mistress of meanness. And I accuse him of being selfish, seriously.
He asked me for my flight number; he’d come pick me up, he said. A simple no thanks was my response, and it should have been my cue to hang up; a “dig yourself out while there’s still hope” moment. Yeah. You can probably guess how that worked out. He then asked for my airline, but again I refused.
Unfortunately, I was sitting right under a very loud loudspeaker. Delta airlines, paging Washington passenger Dan Rydell…
I hoped he hadn’t heard.
He had. He was there waiting at Reagan when I crawled off, cranky and very much disappointed in myself. Status: very bad.
Things are never as easy as you imagine, and it’s clear I have some work still to do.
The upshot, though? I had a fantastic weekend. My sister is a doll. I am definitely not in college anymore (in case anyone was wondering), but really, that realization wasn’t all that sad. I think some things—like, oh, maybe questionable decision-making—you never really grow out of. You just learn to recognize the patterns and adapt accordingly. So long as your head’s in the right place, there’s nothing wrong with progress and positive realizations. Drinking vodka cocktails before a power hour of craptastic beer to prefunk a Friday night down at the mods; an ill-conceived phone call to a person you shouldn’t be contacting. Yes, we have learning still to do, but the balance is tipping in our favor, I think, as we keep on towards home.
Today I am 27. In spite of everything, I don’t feel that much older. Neither do I feel really bad about taking today off sick. ”Mental recuperation,” I like to think. I made beer pancakes to celebrate this momentous anniversary of mine (above), though the dishes may remain in the sink for awhile as in a few moments here I’ll be heading up for yet another weekend in Boston, courtesy of my parents, and will spend some quality time with my youngest sister. Happy weekend everyone!
Some glitch in my little green ipod got stuck on “play all songs” this morning on my walk to the train. I discovered thus that somehow, somewhere, I downloaded a song called “African Bamba.” It’s actually quite catchy.
The song was transmitting its (quite effective, actually) “wake up now” message to my brain when I picked up the paper and saw the headline: “At the Pentagon, A Day No One Will Forget.” And then I remembered.
It’s not that I’d actually forgotten, of course. Those kinds of things don’t really ever leave. But I remembered with a fierceness, a sharpness that the years have dulled.
I thought to myself, I shouldn’t post today. My trivial problems—how far behind I’m falling writing back to friends’ emails, how the inanities of my daily life keep me hitting my head into the table and shouting WHY, how I somehow made it to the gym last night but forgot to put on a shirt, and no, I’ve never been one of those girls who’s all “maybe I’ll just run in my underwear today”—seem so suddenly ridiculous.
There’s a balance between dwelling and forgetting, between memorializing and moving on. We all remember what that day felt like, where we were and how things have never quite been the same since. We always will. It’s a part of our fabric now. But to leave it there, to halt what happens now because of what was then, would be to somehow let them win, I think.
My calendar says it’s Patriot Day. Is that true? If so, I vote for federal holiday status. I vote to sleep in and make pancakes and write letters to people I’ve forgotten, get up and live a little, breathe in and breathe out and remember all that I have.
Such a better alternative to the corner-facing, desk-bound me that tries now to write herself out of a fantastically boring pile of Must Do Now. Speaking of which. Ahem.
I’ve worked late every. single. night this week, and at this rate, am going for a royal flush (or a straight? Or something? I learned poker in the convent, which I think explains a lot about my issues. Poker and otherwise). Troubling thing is, no one else seems to notice and/or care. Booo lazy people I work with, and boo jackasses who evade child support, then sue about it on idiotic technicalities and land in 7th Circuit opinions on my desk.
Definitely time to bust out the African Bamba.
I was in the kitchen at work today heating up the tasty deliciousness that is trader joe’s kung pao noodles when I met this mug in the sink. It listed numerous qualities and attributes in unabashedly large red script including, I’m sorry to say, “Scorpio people are powerful and loveing.”
What is the consumer-driven, English-speaking world coming to? I’d like to know who authorized the production of such a fine piece of grammatical offense. (Likely manufactured abroad, so okay, some grace). I’d also like to know who forked over American dollars to purchase it. (Well-meaning and not detail-oriented friends and family of the fine scorpio, undoubtedly). But who on our floor of writers and editors can use it without cringing? Maybe it’s all a big joke, and the error is known and acknowledged and makes the owner smile. I’m going to go with that, because the alternative—that no one else notices or is bothered by it—is just too frightful to contemplate.
There are certain dangers that come with carrying a red pen, either in hand or in mind. You get bothered by loveing scorpios, for one. You correct comma errors in e-mails when forwarding them on, say. And sometimes the only pen in your purse is a red one. One that is, you find out when you decide to walk through a hurricane and stand in a flash-flood, water-soluble.
I think some cultures consider it bad luck to sign your name in red, like you’re inviting fate to come in and mess with you. They may be onto something.
My law school roommate flew in for the weekend, for some old-fashioned yaaaaay we’re single together again!-style days. She’s amazing, this girl. She’s blonde and loud and southern and most everything I’m not, but we get along so well it’s often considered alarming. People would always be coming up to me being all, “You? And Roommate? Are Roommates? But how does that work?” I don’t know how, exactly, but it did. And it was marvelous.
She had a White House tour at 8.30 in the a.m. on Saturday, and honestly, I was impressed she went. First of all, we’d be up till nearly 2, and that bottle of peachy vodka? Yes, the one that I bought new on my way home from work? Empty. Whoops.
Second, and most importantly, Tropical Storm Hanna was having her way with the DC metro region. It didn’t look too bad from the coziness of my apartment, or even from the protected courtyard outside of my windows. It just looked like rain, like a little bit of grey; nothing two girls well-seasoned by substantial time in Seattle couldn’t handle. Well.
The bad part about White House tours is that you can’t bring anything in with you. No cell phones. No purses. No bags or, as it happens, umbrellas.
The plan was that the roommate and I would rendez-vous at a pre-arranged clandestine location for the hand-off. E.g. I met her at the Caribou Coffee at 17th & Penn, with her purse and all its insides. Then we were going to walk around, see a museum or the Library of Congress maybe, and grab lunch.
When the wet trains finally spat me out downtown, I found the roommate sitting in front of the faux coffeehouse fireplace, wringing water out of her shirt. I was really regretting the cutie red shoes I’d put on, and was wondering why I’d bothered to fix my hair, or even shower for that matter, at all. We opted to head back home—“If I’d had my phone, I could have called you and saved you the trip!” she said. There was a point on our trek back where the roommate lost a flipflop crossing the street. It caught a wave and floated nearly half a block. It was awesome.
Although we both had umbrellas for the return, everything in my bag and hers was basically swimming in the remnants of the storms down south. With the flash of marvelous foresight that is me, I’d hauled my entire work bag along for the trip. Positively everything’s in there, and I always seem to forget something that I want when transferring things around. Especially when I’m in a hurry. I have far too many purses, but that’s another story entirely. I also have a checklist on my door reminding me of the essentials; but that too, along with its general ineffectiveness, is another story.
The casualties were many. A book I’ve borrowed from my mom is near death, and is sitting in the bathroom, discolored and water-warped. The hairdryer, which is really a curly diffuser, couldn’t do much. We did all we could, etc. (Incidentally, I ordered mom a new one today on Amazon—I recently got Amazon Prime and am just fascinated by how fast things come. I seriously keep placing orders, just because I can. It’s like magic, because from this computer it already has my credit card number and everything, so all I have to do is click yes, send it right away! And pronto, it’s here. The madness must stop.)
Some of my vitamins managed to escape from their travel-sized bottle, too, and proceeded to melt. Vitamin B supplements are great for many things, and I love love love the energy boost they give me on those totally blaaah days. Not so much loving the vitamin-smelling sludge in my bag. And it won’t wash out. And perfume to mask the raw earthy-ness of it is proving wildly ineffective. Chanel, meet Vitamin B. Vitamin B, Chanel. It was never meant to be.
Going up the scale from bad to worse to really just pathetic, every page of my diary written in red ink washed away. It’s all water-logged, at least the bottom half of every page is; but the black and the blue, they remain legible. The red, however, has given way to pink pages, scores of thoughts and words once held, now forever unknown. It’s beautifully symbolic, somehow; here, as I count down the last days of what was certainly a rough year, there’s a clean slate, or at least a muted one. Close the soggy book and start over. Or something.
The weather cleared up, as weather is wont to do, and we had a spectacular time. A pile of laundry, a deflated aerobed sulking in the corner, and a nice note on the kitchen table are the only tangible hints that things were different around here, but still a piece of the weekend remains. I know what went on, and I’m better for it; that’s the most important thing, anyway. I pack her things away, but keep the memories; I put the red pen back into my washed out bag, and will keep thinking soluble thoughts. Though perhaps with a bit more caution.
Nothing is ever cut-and-fry. Unless you’re talking fish and chips, anyway, in which case sign me up.
I realized the other day that I haven’t been single in a really long time. Not mentally single, anyway; there’s always been some guy that I’m lusting after, some guy I’m imagining I’m with, even if it isn’t true. Not so much, these days. I think I’m off love, in much the way one goes “off soda” or “off Reality TV.” There’s a withdrawal, and then a calm; suddenly I have so much time/so much energy/etc. I’m not kidding myself and this won’t last forever. It never does with the sodas or the TV, at least it never has for me. I know this. But right now, it’s a really odd feeling.
I’ve been caught in a streak of oddness, of not-quite-rightness, all week. My alarm went off earlier than I’d planned today, leftovers from yesterday’s meeting that wasn’t. Yesterday: I was downtown, early and preppy-looking in my cutie business suit, sailing into a K street conference room a crisp quarter-hour early. And I sat, and sat, and sat; alone with some big tables as the second hand ran its laps around the clock. This is one of my big fears when I’m somewhere unfamiliar: that I’m just square in the wrong spot. I got up, peeked my head around the door, and went up to the security guard. He’d never heard of my meeting. He checked his computer. “Nope, the earliest thing I have is a 10.00 meeting on Middle-Eastern affairs,” he said. That was definitely not it.
I’m panicking now, as my crisp early arrival is perilously close to becoming “just squeaked in.” Did they move it, I wondered? He sent me upstairs to check with a more informed receptionist.
She had nothing. “We have no record of that meeting,” she said, and my e-mail printout boldly announcing Her Company and This Meeting did nothing to convince her otherwise. At two minutes to nine, of course, no one was answering their phones; I sat around for a bit, watched CNN on the massive wall-mounted flatscreens, and ultimately made my way back to work when word came down that that meeting? It was canceled ages ago. Thanks for the update, yahoos.
Somewhere between there and here, the hems in both pant legs just went on strike and fell out. I must have walked through some stitch-eating deadzone or something; I mean seriously. I was wearing rather flat shoes as it was, so when I sauntered back into the office, with no notes, no meeting to report on, and pants that were veritably eating my feet, I really perfected that “I’m a right mess” look.
I ought to keep a sewing kit in my office for expressly this purpose. Alas. The stapler it was. I stapled my pants together. It was a sad day for that suit.
So this morning, sleepily weighing the pros and cons of choosing coffee over tea in my kitchen, I touch—barely, barely touch—a bowl, which bumps a wine glass, which falls into a measuring cup and the three crash spectacularly to bits on the floor. And I thought I was getting so ahead by (a) actually doing the dishes last night, and laying them out so neatly to dry; and (b) getting up with the alarm, and getting a jump on the day even though, yes, it was early.
The day only gets better when J comes to pay a little visit. The security guard calls me around noon; he’s downstairs waiting. The strong and bold me in my head would tell them I have no idea who he is; I don’t want to see him; send him home. But that just isn’t the me I actually am, on most days. I grab my keys and elevate down to see what the guy wants.
He wants to hang out. He brought me a sushi lunch. He wants to talk about what I want to do for my birthday (which is, unfortunately, next week. Next week! My days of 26 are drawing to a sudden but inevitable close. Despair and die).
I don’t particularly want to see him on my birthday. I don’t particularly want to see him at all. I feel … nothing. I feel nothing, and that itself says all the everything I need.
Now, though, I’m starting to feel bad. For so long, too long probably, he was my only real friend here. He doesn’t seem to have any plans to phase that out. It’s really hard. Can you go from being a girlfriend back to being a friend? How can that be done? Is he ever going to find my nothingness, and is mine going to last? Questions without easy answers, surely.
Back in the office, I polish up and submit the analysis I was working on before his call came in. It was centered on a case concerning the Lamborghini trademark. An errant click of the mouse allowed our ridiculously efficient spell-check to whore up the whole thing, changing every “Lamborghini” to “Lamebrains.” Lamebrains. You’ve got to be kidding me. How do you justify not knowing Lamborghini, but knowing “Lamebrains”? I’m pretty sure that’s not a recognized word in any language.
A sample sentence from that piece, as submitted, reads as follows: Automobili Lamebrains was an Italian corporation that owned the Lamebrains family of trademarks, and enjoyed an exclusive right to distribute and sell Lamebrains cars and related merchandise.
I did not realize the error until I get this email from our competent captain, my boss:
Magda,
Thanks for the lamebrains write-up. It looks really good. I think we have a backcite for some of the cases though? Pls check.
Good gracious.
It really just has been one of those days.
