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It’s like I’ve become a different person recently. I’ve been exhausted and up tremendously late—but I’ve accomplished essentially nill. I’ve fallen madly in love and have had some of the best and most magical dates—but I’m falling out of touch with the world. I don’t know where the hours are going, the time to write back and call home, the time to stay somewhere in the loose perimeter of the loop. My organized hierarchy of things done here and now, then and there is crumbling. I guess I could panic. Instead, I’m just kind of floating along. It’s wholly surreal. This whole love thing is giving me a new sense of stability, I think; it’s redrawing the boundaries. I’m not relying on my lists like I used to. It’s good—but it’s also bad. I want some of that control back. The starred folder in the gmail outweighs my drafts 10 to 1, which is Not. Cool. Time just slips slips slips away with him.
The afternoon hours after church and lunch Sunday are instructive: they found the PhD and me … well, let’s just say “involved,” in a situation implicating my bedroom and the afternoon sun; air conditioning cranked to counter the heat otherwise a bi-product of this closeness we can’t seem to shake. So we’re there, just being; we’re getting a little feisty when we hear this ringing. “Is that your phone?” he asks. It isn’t. We ignore it, and carry on. The ringing stops; quiet, but then a voice. A LOUD voice. A screechy metallic voice, the likes of which can only come from volume too high on a feeble speakerphoned connection. “Thank you for calling AAA Mid-Atlantic!,” a perky woman’s voice said from somewhere in the tangle of my sheets. Expletives were uttered as we located his phone, terminated the interchange (with our apologies), and tried to pick back up. Then we laughed. Hard.
By the time I noticed the hour I was massively late to my evening church group. Oops? Things didn’t get much better on Monday, when I realized I still hadn’t transferred currency yet every place I called was all, rupees? Did you order them in advance? We can have them for you in three to five days, which is fine till I realize I don’t have that. Evidently I’m leaving the country today. TONIGHT. Boarding a plane and peacing out. (Late June: did it or did it not come flying out of freaking nowhere?)
I found only one place—one—with currency in stock, and put it all on hold; after work I trained up there and bought them clear out. The commute was a disaster of delays and full trains, and I’m still peeved at the way metro handled it. “Police incident,” they said; expect delays on the red line. “A train is experiencing mechanical difficulties.” Technically, okay, yes, that’s accurate—but kind of like saying “we’re getting some rain” as your house washes down the street and your pets drown in flood waters. I get the desire to not cause concern, because chaos is contagious, but really? A police situation and mechanical difficulties? While we were pushing each other on and off of trains, sweating frustration and holding curses under our breaths, people were dying. That seems somehow so wrong, so shameful.
Five billion people called and e-mailed to be sure I was alive. I hate that I feel like I barely had time to check in with them.
I think sometimes you do break down; you need a tow, or a hanger in your window, to set things straight again. Other times, you just need the offer. The reminder that help is there, and that there is a wider world that you’ll return to someday. There’s a time and a place to say ah, no thanks, kiss a little longer, and take the long and scenic walk back. It’s the “back” that’s important. This love is real, but it’s so new; we’re on the roller coaster down, but there will be a back up. The magic carpet always lands, and really, it’s the things we do on the ground that make those night-flights possible.
So I’m taking a little karmic hiatus off in India through the fourth; when I come back, I intend to be back. We’ll see how that plays out. In the meantime! Happy summer. Love and saris all around.
Not yet. Not today, and probably not tomorrow, but someday soon for sure. The PhD is mine and I am his; there’s a deep, deep beauty here, and we both see it.
The way I’ve been talking the last few days makes me want to reach out and smack myself. I don’t believe in this kind of love, I keep reminding my heart; people who just meet and BAM, “it’s forever” are not seeing reality.
Or maybe they are. I feel like I’ve been issued an invitation quite out of the blue for the coolest, most exclusive club; a club where everyone who’s in just knows they’re in. Where women wear ball gowns and men sip cocktails in coattails; where the lighting is just a little bit blurred, like you’re floating through an oil painting. We are hovering in an ethereal world somewhere above the me I was, the life I had, before. It looks like just clouds. Come around that corner, though, and there’s this whole new dimension. Now that I’ve been here, now that I’m in? Absolutely everything has changed.
I think this is what it’s like to be in love.
My parents are thrilled. My grandma told me she “could just tell.” This is forever; this is my story.
Don’t doubt this; live it, he wrote to me. That’s pretty much the plan.
Not so much the plan: continuing to tell myself that 3am is the new midnight. I need to kick this “drunk on love, who needs sleep!” mindset or I suspect I’ll be singing a “who needs employment, I’ve been fired!” tune.
He’s moving to New York today, and I’ve an evening with the Theresas penned in from long ago. That should be interesting. How are you? Ohh, great, work’s good, and hey I met this guy and he’s amazing and we’re madly in love and I’m definitely going to marry him! And no, he’s not Catholic and I’ve actually not been going to mass for at least a year! Surprise!
Like I said … absolutely everything has changed.
Otherwise titled: off the market. Or maybe: can this REALLY be my life!?
Oh, love. They say it’ll happen when it happens; they say when you know, you know. They say any number of things that “they,” being faceless and malleable, can’t back up, but damn it if they’re not all too often right.
It’s way too soon to fold my hand, to cash out and write I’m in love, y’all. I know this. Thing is, that feels like the only course. This whole “date around” theme that seems to have taken hold? That whole “don’t rush anything and take it slow”? Yeah. Not so much.
We collided, the PhD and I, in a very rare window. His e-mails and my answers; my crises and his listening ear. It couldn’t have happened any other way.
Friday late—8.30 on—was the only overlap our schedules yielded last week. “Let’s meet at that sushi place you like in Old Town,” he wrote. Not wanting to look like a total idiot, I pretended I actually had a favorite sushi place in Old Town. I don’t. I know all sorts of places downtown … the sushi, I fear, I have never kept local. He lives (conveniently) right up the street, so Old Town was clearly the best plan; google, then, to the rescue. (Yes, the same google implicated as an accomplice of The Crazy. The same Crazy who’s been conspicuously silent on this one, save some wildly unsuccessful searches indicating that he died in Virginia in 1848. Huh.).
The restaurant I ultimately chose was awesome, but totally, totally small. The reviewers said a lot about the quality; “this place is great!,” they all wrote. None of them bothered to mention “Except it only has four tables.” There was a bit of a wait when I got there, but once he arrived, we were next up and a table just magically opened. We split a bottle of sake and talked till they were all but bussing our table, there in the suddenly empty restaurant; we took those words down to the water, and walked up and down the Potomac. Entrenched and looking to steal a few more minutes, we sat down on the riverfront. Couples walked past, coming back from drinks and late dinners, and as the echoes of their footsteps faded, the birds got quiet. The moon moved across the sky.
We were laughing about something when it hit us: there in the east, the sun. Evening fell and morning came: we talked our way to Saturday.
In a shockingly sad lot of ways, that conversation—that connection—was exactly what I thought I was going to find last weekend in Pennsylvania. Like, to a T. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that, or more surprised about this; all this goes to show, I guess, that no matter how much you plan some things, you can’t court fate. You just can’t.
We walked back up those cobble-stones to his jeep in the early morning light, and it just was. A collision of he and I; a broad-brushed stroke on the canvas of us in bold colors. Indelible, and so much the beginning.
I wasn’t home for ten minutes before my alarm went of. I smiled at the backwardness of it, washed my face, and got into bed.
I spent a lot of time Saturday afternoon trying to decide whether it was all just a dream; whether, if I just closed my eyes and yielded back to sleep, I could find myself back down there.
It was the most surreal conversation. It’s foolish to try to assign it words, but it’s like this: I was me. I got to say whatever I wanted, and he liked me. Just as me. The man’s intensely brilliant—no joke, he can quote Latin and things—but I never once felt like I had to measure up. Looking back, another thing that impresses me is that we weren’t drinking. (!! I know). The vodka speaks a shiny soliloquy, sure, but it isn’t really me, not in the way intentionally uncensored words are. There was an intimacy there that was not at all artificial. (Is it sad to admit I’d forgotten what that’s like?)
Saturday brought another amazing set of e-mails; Sunday, a somewhat awkward India meeting. We talked outside my car afterwards like shy high schoolers stealing glances in the parking lot between classes.
He came over to my little apartment that night. We still weren’t out of words, though I don’t know how that’s possible; he held my hand, and I held his right back. (And then I held a lot more, but this is a PG-13 blog, mmm-hmm).
He asked for a photo of my sisters and me from the biochemist wedding because, he said, I “look so beautiful in it.” He left with one on my hair elastics around his wrist. I can wear my tallest tall-shoes, and he still beats me by a fraction of an inch (I made him stand in front of the mirror—yes). He smiles at my insanity, but his eyes and his kiss say he’s falling, hard.
He called me this afternoon to wish me luck at the dentist (ssss booo, nasty cavities); he can’t wait to see me, and can we please get together tonight? I listen to the voicemail again as I put another coat of caladryl on my mosquito-chomped legs. (The conversation was oh-so-worth it. But my god, I’m a mosquito magnet; my legs look like I’ve got severe chicken pox. I count 37 right now, and that’s not including my back or shoulders. Yikes). In five hundred thousand ways, it’s falling together so perfectly.
Except. (Because there’s always an except): he’s moving. To New York. On Thursday. (Yes, as in a pithy TWO DAYS from now). He’s a college professor, and he’s taken a totally kick-ass post up that way. It starts right after India (which, SHOCKER, is NEXT WEEK).
In a really insane way, I feel like it’s going to work notwithstanding. I just know it will, in a way that words can’t possibly spell out. There’s something going on here that’s so real, and so powerful; something that’s totally shaken up my expectations and prior understandings. It’s radical and new and it just feels so right. He’s already invited me up, and says he’ll send loads of t-shirts and sweatpants and things from his new school (after my own heart, yes! I’m such a sucker for that kind of stuff). He says he doesn’t know how he’ll make it, now that he’s seen a glimpse of this new us, but he promises it was worth it, and that we’ll fight for it.
But that doesn’t undercut that this could really suck, in a lot of ways. I’ll jump into it here, and I have no problem writing out I’M FALLING IN LOVE WITH THIS GUY. This is my head-space, and that’s what it’s like. But in practice, I’ve got to work hard to keep it real, and in check. I’m going to have to.
Welcome to my life. I just love to complicate the hell out of it.
But oh, our poor priest. I don’t think he counted on this little romance at all. This could get interesting, this keeping-of-the-distance in India. Then again, though, isn’t that what real romance is? The stuff of spontaneity, and intrigue; of kisses stolen in dark corners in foreign lands? This may be a consequence of growing up on Carey Grant and Clark Gable, but I’m prepared to say that the adventure starts now. And it’s going to be a wild one.
So it’s been a long and arduous week called SUCK around these parts, and there’s no real use pretending otherwise. I’ve abused the snooze alarm every. single. day, and have come into work looking miserable with sort of still wet, sort of fried by humidity hair only to find masses of work and disorganized chaos filling up my inbox. Today marked the third consecutive lunch I’ve had to take with interns, wowing them with how much I love my job (HA. Ahaha). And walking to the train yesterday, I met the girl who was the best man’s date from the wedding; turns out she lives in my building (Random! Yes.). We talked the whole way there about the weekend and what I thought; I put on a happy face and told her how beautiful it was, and how much fun I had. I was tempted to tell her how interesting I thought her boyfriend’s speech was, but I resisted. It was really, truly, probably the worst best man speech I’ve ever heard. Obviously wasted. And awkward, too—the guy cheated on, then divorced his own wife, once upon a time, which unfortunately played in. AWESOME.
I didn’t say anything mostly, I think, because I felt for her. I’ve been that girl, the one who’s haplessly and blindly in love with a loser. See, e.g., this weekend; see, e.g., my life.
Few things hurt more than the realization that what we believe exists is in reality a mirror-like desire duping us in return.
Great sentence, that. It’s not mine—it’s borrowed from an e-mail I received early in the week from the PhD. He asked about the wedding, and in a moment of searing and wine-induced honesty, I set it all out. I kind of expected never to hear from him again. My experience teaches that men don’t respond to me when I want to be real. On that precedent, the page and a half I got back not a day later was kind of magical.
We’re going to sushi tonight, he and I. Maybe it’s true, what they say after all, that good things can come from chaos—that flowers can bloom out of gravel.
June is a volatile month in these parts. It’s caught up in that transition from the calm of spring to the torrid heat of summer, and there’s a real resistance there. Other seasons seem to slide effortlessly into one another—shoes become boots, sweaters need and then lose coats almost without incident. Something about the summer won’t give so easily. It’s cracks of lightening, claps of thunder at 4am; sticky humidity that just screams to be broken. Winds and hail; torrential downpours drenching even the most conscious umbrella-carrier. Pant legs soaked up and down the district line, without much semblance of a warning. Sunburned weekends yield to severe weather alert Mondays, and what looked like a gentle rain quickly proves anything but.
No amount of water is impenetrable, however. No storm takes everything. It’s all a part of the passing of days; it’s the getting from here to there. Each puddle a stepping stone, each splash a reminder of something better. Back when summer rain meant dancing down the sidewalks, and muddied clothes that can be washed, after all; back when droplets on the skin were comforting. Back when they felt like home.
And when the rains leave, when the thunder fades to clouds that roll out as quickly as they rolled in, it’s magic. The sky opens, and the sun comes out. Blue beneath the grey turns to pink, then red; slipping beneath the surrogate horizon of buildings and towered homes, a promise of tomorrow.
Alexandria, tonight, from this living room. Perfect.
It was a wine-soaked weekend, and a tear-stained train home. It’s over.
Somehow, somewhere, I made a massive miscalculation, the extent of which I have not yet fully ascertained. Deep-sea divers are looking for a recorder box I do not expect they will find. I was so concerned about making good choices, and protecting my heart—but from what? It turns out there was really never really a choice at all. Never really an opportunity for heart-bruising, at least not at the outset. I was his friend. His “and guest.” He wanted to catch up, because “it’s been so long.”
Except you don’t really catch up with anyone when you’re in the wedding party, do you? You’re off at lunches and breakfasts, at photo shoots and escorted entries. A good friend or stable mate is a good companion. A feeble foreign affair, resurfaced so newly from the depths, is not.
Friday night was really all we had. It started well. But knowing now what I didn’t then, I’m well within my bounds to say that he should never, ever have kissed me. He should not have found a room with just one bed acceptable, and he should never, ever have returned my impassioned “I missed you” with a “me too.”
Because to me, those words were real. I missed him. I ached for him and longed for him and if he would have looked closely, he would have known that all along. This was my whole understanding of our relationship: that we had something huge, something real, but it just never got a chance to make it. If that were true, he would have felt it, too. I was banking on a common ground, on this idea of “where to from here.” We could have either said, wow, this is worth fighting for, let’s give this a chance no matter the distance and uncertainty; or, in the alternative, I’m sorry, I just don’t have it in me to keep this up, but thank you, and hey you’re great anyway.
Those were false options. The presupposition there is that there was something at all. I don’t think there ever was for him. I was first and always just a friend, a girl who was nice and sweet and we kept in touch, sort of. I never considered that possibility, and oh, do I feel foolish for it now. All of the words I wrote, all of the things I thought I knew: Illusory. I’ve been holding on to him, but he has not been holding on to me. This was unimaginably clear to me over the weekend. It unfolded slowly, but it was unmistakable: there, as the smoke clears, this horrific truth that must have been there all along. He was the long phrase in the middle of the crossword puzzle that you think you’ve nailed square-on. It fits and it works, and aren’t you clever for coming up with it so quickly! You build on it, answering other clues to form to the letters. Some of them are questionable, and you kind of wonder; but they do work, sort of, and you keep going. You look for mistakes and missed turns all around the edges. You erase and scratch out the periphery without questioning the frame.
The moment of dawning truth when you realize that your anchor is a false one, that you’ve been building all this time on a total and complete error—that feeling, that impossible and sinking oh, NO-ness of it, is quintessentially exactly what is banging in my heart right now. Times five billion.
He said he was sorry, that he never meant to mess with my heart as he hugged me at the train station. I told him not to worry about it. He said he’d write and explain, but I’m not sure whether there are any words. I, at least, am totally depleted.
“I’m staying with some of the bridesmaids,” I told my mom. “Some of them are single, or they aren’t staying with their boyfriends, or something. Anyway, they’re getting a suite, and they said I’m more than invited to hang out with them!”
Of course not. Of course I’m staying with him. My powers of on-the-spot fabrication still impress me, though.
Nothing slips past my mom, and I’ve learned to preemptively seal my stories with an impenetrable water-tight click. I suspect she knows what really goes on; no one that smart is that blind. It’s just a little dance we do.
“He was the one with the girlfriend. That Helen,” she says. “Ellen,” I correct, but to myself I’m thinking, Really? I mentioned that? I named her out loud, to my mother? Really? “You definitely had a thing for him,” she adds, and I cringe. “I didn’t realize you were still in touch.” (Of course not, mom; I forgot you even knew he existed).
The Japan Man did not come on his road trip. He is, however, in a wedding this weekend up in Pennsylvania, and a bizarre twist of chance conversation found me agreeing to be his date.
“I’ll meet you at the hotel,” he said. “I’ll have a key for you.”
My stomach has been in knots all day. Productivity, it’s fair to say, has not been high.
I’m well aware of all that’s at stake here, and how this story reads. Adopting an objective eye, I want to smack myself. “You’re undoing all of your good work!” I’d cry. “You should have said no! Just practice with me—N-O!” I’d coach. Better yet, “This guy has a toxic hold on you, and if you cave you’re going to mess up the future of your relationships, possibly forever!” I see that. Really, I do. But I feel, too; I feel so much more than logic can justify. This one was different. He was different.
I’m good at writing dismissive f-you-too e-mails, and I’m good at unilaterally severing ties. Writing JAPAN MAN CAN SUCK IT, in all caps, to all of my friends. I’m good at telling myself that it’s over, and moving on.
Thing is, it hasn’t worked. Not really. Not with him. For nearly five years, he’s been in my thoughts, that one hanging “what if” that has veritably haunted everything since. I was naïve and stupid, yes. I loved him in a very real way, though, in that land of once upon a time, and while it sounds cheesy, I really think it’s closure that I’m after. In order to move forward, be it with the smartie PhD or otherwise, this—this japan business—it has to end.
As random as some things seem, I often wonder if they aren’t really just part of a bigger pattern we don’t see. Maybe this has to happen right now. Maybe it’s the only way. Maybe I’m finally in a place where I’m ready to see him and not have my heart go all aflutter like I’m 22 again. Not expect to round the corner and smack into him, off in an airport somewhere, and fall in love all princess-style. Maybe it’s finally ripened and I’m ready to let go; maybe this has to be flushed out with finality to make way for something new, something even bigger. Maybe I’m just cursed.
Hotel key or no, though, he will be swiftly informed of a major policy-shift since our last encounter. I no longer sleep with strangers. Period. (goal 1).
Neither do I drink to the point of poor choices. (goal 2).
And my heart is locked behind a spiked tower, with a moat, and some fierce crocodiles that eat men who come in without first passing a rigorous screening process. (goal 3).
It’s just something that I have to do. I have to know what happens. I have to know who we are.
I was going though some old papers this weekend, filing things away on a quiet Saturday morning, when I came across some of the diaries I kept as I was first moving out here. I used to be really really good at keeping a diary; it was a running commentary on my life. From high school forward, I have a veritable bookshelf’s worth. A from-the-front account, each of them; the diary was a book I’d pull out when I was bored, or frustrated. I always had it on me. It was raw, and real, and true, that writing. I cringe when I read a lot of it. But it was cathartic, and I needed it; it was me, who I was then, and that’s valuable.
I’ve fallen away from diarying lately, and I can’t quite finger why. The last—three? four?—books I’ve had have been stop-and-start, sometimes-carried collections of occasional thoughts. It loses something real when that continuity goes. Some of it is this blog space, sure. But not all of it. As much as I want to be totally real here, and as much as I am, it’s not everything. It can’t be. (Who’d read that?). My last diary, started in earnest on my birthday, has a last entry date of 4th April. That doesn’t seem so long ago … but good god, is it really June already? A day-to-day list of observances, it is not. I miss that. And I wonder if that absence is part of why I feel so overwhelmed anymore.
There’s something very validating to count back the days, to look back at who you really were and who you are; to count forward on feelings rather than real-world logic. Sure, a lot of the ramblings of the me of years past is just sad. A lot of it is painful to read, to see my hopes and loves and fears with the knowledge of where it all ultimately led.
But on balance (and life is nothing if not a balance), to count your days in thoughts, in words on paper, is something of a pleasing endeavor. My diaries aren’t as explosive as they used to be, and I don’t think they would be even if I yielded back to writing every day. That’s part of growing up. Still, there’s something about looking back, remembering, that makes all of the silliness, the randomness, all of the naïve pain worthwhile.
That’s part of the reason I keep archives of this space. A loud and cantankerous contingency of my psyche wants to delete them, those early posts: that anyone can read back and build a story of me is kind of alarming. But it is me, or at least a piece thereof, and there’s something beautifully real to that.
Friday night, I was out to dinner with the three DC girls who have become my lifelines. They’re fabulous, all of them. We’re all just here, thinking our thoughts and dreaming our dreams; ordering another drink while sharing sympathetic sighs for the screaming children at the next table. Offering updates and listening to shared troubles. Friends I can call at 11pm and say, help, I may be making a big mistake, I’m so confused, I don’t even know whether I’m coming or going. Women to talk to, and women who care. Apartments to visit and books to discuss and lend out. E-mails in the day that matter. That kind of thing.
I look back to late May 2008, however, and the story is markedly different.
I’ve lived here for a year and a half, and have no friends to call up for a girly movie night. How is this?, I wrote, nearly a year ago to the day.
Sometimes I don’t really know what drives me to just sit here and wait for life to happen. I want that close Charlotte-Miranda-Samantha-Carrie bond, but I don’t know what makes me think I’ll get it if I just stare, willing the phone to ring.
Reading back now, I really wish I had a day-to-day narrative for tracking, to see the transition more pointedly. For the me of last year to have seen the me of Friday night! Such, such a difference. But a difference I could not have anticipated: it wasn’t the way I thought it would go down at all. If you’d have sat me down then with crayons and a ream of paper and said, hey, draw your future friends, it would have looked nothing like last weekend … and yet, last weekend was positively perfect. I think it’s like that sometimes. You just have to trust that it’s going to happen. You have to let go of your crayoned ideas of what it’s going to look like, and just roll with it. Or something.
I’m trying to apply this to dating, too. I want to look back at this post next year, and be all, ah, look at yourself now, with your fabulous boyfriend that is so not what you expected, yet so utterly perfect. (Or even, I suppose, “your fabulous life.” I’ll not be too picky; if history has taught me anything, it’s that my agendas? Yeah, they basically mean nothing, have no value, are worth net zero in the mystery world of the future).
I’m like that little girl in Miracle on 34th street, right. “I believe.” I believe in the blank pages, and the mystery of the archives I haven’t yet written. I believe in happiness coming when you least expect it. I believe in strange surprises and twists from seeming nowhere that start so small but really, truly change everything. I believe, I believe; I know it’s silly, but I believe.
