chasing pavements

I’ve come to a very clear realization in the past few days: I am terrible at interpersonal relationships. I think I get it, but I don’t. I think I am doing the right thing, but I’m not. People confound me. I certainly don’t believe things are in black and white, but I have a clear sense of my motivations, and I try to be transparent about my intent, and act accordingly. Either I am also wrong about myself, or my sometimes painful self awareness obscures knowledge of others. This, L would say, is my 4ness manifesting.
—
so much depends
upon

a wooden rolling
pin

glazed with pale
butter

beside the white
apron.

utterly macabre

so far this valentine’s day, i have slept an hour. for the past weekend i have been having massive asthma attacks that do not respond to my emergency inhaler. because i am bad at self care, because i think i am just overreacting and the feeling will pass, i have failed to see a doctor or seek help with this problem (somewhere, lynn is shuddering). naturally, it’s escalated, and i find myself now on monday morning, wide awake from coughing and general ache. my oh so acute skills of observation tell me that perhaps this isn’t strictly asthma, but may perhaps be some kind of cold or infection. at approximately 3:30 am, i resolve to call for a doctor’s appointment in the morning. at 4:30am, i look up 24 hour pharmacies to potentially seek out cough meds. at 5:00 am, i resist using my expired codeine cough syrup. at 5:05, i opt for a round of steroids that i didn’t take the last time i had an asthma crisis. at 5:10 i make tea. at 5:15, i email a professor to cancel our afternoon meeting. at 5:30 i sit down with my blog, neglected, too, for the better part of the new year.

what is this resistance to self-love? i assure you, it’s not a comfort with death that makes me so careless about sustaining my own life. i am terrified of dying. i have panic attacks about dying, that in turn trigger my asthma, which could in fact kill me. surely, i am not SO dense as to not understand the repercussions of my actions. it’s not even laziness, which is the source of much of my apathy. while all these excuses may emerge from time to time, may mutate and generate more creative and sometimes convincing arguments for inaction, at the root of the root, the core, if you will, is a sad truth. i am not a l’oreal ad. i am not empowered by the feminist movement, or even a broader human rights discourse. i have not sufficiently internalized oprah and pop psychology or even the warm affirmations of my friends and family. in some distant corner of my brain, on some intangible plane of my psyche, i seem to believe i am not worth the effort.

this dis/belief manifests repeatedly in my bodily care: the treatment of my sciatic nerve, the development of my asthma, and yes, though it is taboo to name it in my self-proclaimed stance of fat positivity, the management of my body’s health and ability. and while i stand by the idea that fatness is not inherently unhealthy just as thinness is not inherently healthy, i do know that the pain i routinely suppress in my body would be significantly alleviated by weight loss. just as i know that the psychic pain i routinely suppress, eschew, or minimize would be significantly alleviated by certain proactive measures: exercise, therapy, asking for help. finally, it’s evident in my relationship to my academic life, both insofar as it profoundly affects my psychic one, and insofar as i am unwilling here too, to take up space, to demand care, to take myself or my work seriously. to quote myself “i take myself seriously as a joke.” (insert secondary joke re: interpellation and citational legacy).

i elaborate this all, not because it’s particularly stunning or new to me but because recently the accumulation of these injuries are congealing into a person that i sometimes do not recognize. into someone who cannot even perform the farce of self care, the farce of confidence. notably, my academic work is suffering. never, in my adult life, have i felt incompetent or unable to satisfactorily complete my school work. while i have certainly questioned my desire to receive a PhD, my desire to adopt the life of an academic, or even the level of success i might achieve (as i have accepted mediocrity), i have never been so demoralized about my purpose, or my efficacy. like a maudlin 17 year old, i bemoan “what’s the point of all this?” i become convinced there is no point to the reading, the writing, the constant nerves and constant production.

and so, as i sip my second cup of tea on yet another bleak valentine’s day morning, i guess i am wondering: how do you love yourself? how do you love yourself when you are incisively aware of your flaws, your failings? when these things overshadow what might be charmed or successful? when you are so open to criticism, when you take it so seriously? when you internalize and relive your (mostly) perceived selfishness, vanity, cruelty, stupidity, homeliness, vapidity, grotesque embodiment? and when you can’t love yourself, when you have seen yourself through your own eyes, and found derision over delight, where do you go, what do you do then?

Fall Break (Down)

All three smoke alarms were going off at once. I didn’t know I *had* three smoke alarms. I’d cranked up the oven to bake biscuits, which need high heat to rise properly, and the heat must have been too much. Every time I fanned one off, another would start up until I was sure my head might burst. The cats were hiding, but couldn’t escape the sound no matter where they went. In the cacophony, the only choice was to take them all down. Then, blessed silence, but for the ringing in my ears, which eventually faded.

I had meant to stop being so maudlin on this forum. All this melancholy, melodramatic obsessive shit–I tire of it. I tire of myself, when I can’t shake it off and move on. I just want to be happy. I really do, but there’s the smoke alarms, the crazy parents, the unrelenting feeling of displacement, the loneliness. All these things combine to be more than me–shoving and pushing until I’m back where I started, talking endlessly about my feelings. I brood. I huff. I cry. I rant. I drown myself out, even as I try to stop speaking.

My mother called me. She wants to know about my brother’s sex life. These are things I deliberately don’t talk to my brother about. In fact, I avoid talking to my brother about many things, because I am constantly being mined for information. My mother calls me, 3 out of 4 times, to see if I know something she doesn’t. It’s awful, playing double agent between your brother and parents. They think he’s lost, and want to forcibly show him out of the forest. I sympathize, but I hate making him feel watched. I hate treating him like a child who can’t make his own mind, who needs to prodded into what’s “best” for him. They hate his girlfriend, and they want him to leave her. He works 70-90 hours a week, sends her money so she doesn’t have to work. I’m not crazy about the situation either, but I won’t make him choose between me and her. They will. They do. It breaks me. And even as I promise I will never make my love for him conditional, I know I’m guilty by association to both parties. My mother sees it as taking sides. If I take his, I’ll be out, too. If I take hers, I lose him. In some ways I already have, our closeness precariously wavering as we both avoid saying or doing something that can be traced, exploited. My baby brother. My beautiful brother. I think I failed him.

Whenever someone hurts me, I find a way to make their failure mine. It’s part narcissism, part control freak. If I had set the proper parameters, if I had done something better, smarter, differently–I wouldn’t feel hurt. If I control the source, I control the feeling. I can walk it off. I’ve been trying to make my way around my hurt feelings for two weeks. It hasn’t worked yet. The tenderness around my heart? It’s still there. Squeezing in my chest as I do the most mundane or elaborate tasks. What should have been something brief, beautiful and easy cut me deeper than I want to acknowledge. I don’t want to believe I let myself be so stupid, so open again. So I replay the moment over in my head, I replay the fallout every time I’m home, and I want to run screaming. Out of the house, out of the bar, out of the city. It follows me across county lines, and I bring the despair home, where I am already more isolated than I care to be.

I have friends, amazing, kind and supportive friends. I have sisters, smart and strong and loyal. I have so much, it feels greedy to want more. But I do–guilty even as I type it–erasing lines that sound too sad, too needy. I want so much my heart feels cavernous–my voice echoing so loud it’s a fire alarm, a siren’s song. I’ll swim until I drown. She’ll sing until I go down.

strange conditions

i’ve been apartment shopping. i have neither the time nor money to make a move at the particular moment, but the craigslist’s offerings are so enthusiastic: indoor pool! free parking! laundry on site! i move every year and this is the first time i’ll have lived in the same space for more than one. it’s nice not to pack up my things, recruit my brother to lift the heavy stuff, pay for a moving truck. still, i feel itchy and dissatisfied. i begin to resent the second bedroom, agonize over the screen doors, antagonize the cats. they’re bored here, too. on nights like this, and so many others, i long for my flint home. the comfort and capacity i feel there, the sense of self that’s so grounded, it can also feel like being buried (on a bad day). i wonder if i’ve made the right decision, moving here. if i should go back, or if this longing is just another way to distance myself from the things i don’t want a part of here, or perhaps don’t want a part of me.

the semester is starting, too, and with it all kinds of fresh promise. new classes, new professors, new friends, new work. i’ve been in school so long i can’t help but feel a heady rush about fall. i buy new clothes, admire pumpkins. i’m filled with ambition about my work: all the things i’ll learn, what i could accomplish. to my dismay, i find myself arrogant about my abilities, my intellect–wanting to prove it to other people, perhaps by taking more classes or saying just the right thing. this posturing is absurd, and frankly, i blame it on people who consistently comment on my competence, or my astuteness. i don’t want to disappoint. and i want to be liked. it really is like middle school all over again.

this weekend, i visited with a friend and we canned tomatoes at his parents’ house. amidst the roiling boil and slippery skins of tomatoes, his parents, who treat me like their own daughter, were asking about why my father left Palestine, why we returned to the US after moving back. what can i say? my father cares, too much, about our well-being. he tries, too hard, to give us everything. and he would sacrifice all to do it. so we moved. and then we moved again, because in his mind, this would keep us safe. eventually, this would make us happy. my father is proud of me these days, following his unfulfilled footsteps of higher learning. he can legitimately excuse my absence from his home because i attend school far enough away. when i moved back from ohio, my mother told me it would be better to stay there than come back if i wouldn’t live with them. they froze me out of the family for the better part of two years when i did come back, live alone.

sitting at my kitchen table now, in my lonely apartment, i don’t regret the choices to leave. it hurts to know how conditional love is, how it can be withdrawn for infractions minor and major in scope. it hurts to know how deeply i’ve internalized the desire to please, to help, to do something to counter the blame of my real and imagined failures. to compensate, always, for my shortcomings. maybe i could go someplace new, where no one knows me well enough to see those ugly things, where i can start over, try again to do it right, to make decisions and present a person that doesn’t cringe at herself so often. but i’m caught between my given and chosen families, my school and personal life–they all collapse into eachother so that i feel stuck, always supposed to be here and there at the same time, always neglecting something, giving not enough to everything. i feel myself peeling away, layer after layer of me sent to stand proxy. i stay, but the person i face is shrinking, hollowing, endlessly diminishing by halves. in practice, invisible; in theory, infinite.

no. i don’t regret leaving. but staying gets harder and harder.

my cat is not dead

It was the first time I had ever woken up with someone on Valentine’s Day. I had been in relationships in the past, but that year was first year that I lived alone, away from the prying eyes of my parents, and could spend all night in my own bed with a lover. I’d gotten up earlier to check the forecast, because it was winter in Ohio, and lots of snow was expected. By some miracle, classes were canceled.

A snow day. On Valentine’s Day. Perfect.

Snuggled in bed, his phone rang first. But he ignored it, as he was wont to do. Then my phone rang. I ignored it the first time. But it rang again and it was his roommate and the roommate would never be so insistent unless something was wrong. I answered, gave him my phone, sat, waited. Next to me, he shivered, eyes clouding, disbelief in the lines around his mouth “Are you sure?” My boyfriend’s cat was dead. It sounds almost funny now, like the beginning to a stoner comedy, or an 80s movie about babysitting. How absurd that on such a beautiful perfect morning, you could wake up to a call about your dead cat.

We got dressed. Tried to dig my car out of the snow but it wouldn’t budge. We walked, from my apartment to High Street, where his roommate met us in his car, took us back to his place. His kitten, who was also in many ways my kitten, was on the floor in the kitchen. Little paws stretched straight out, little eyes wide open. We wrapped him in something, a sheet? A towel? Drove him to the vet, where they gave us back his collar, which he lost, which I found again. They performed a catopsy (we laughed), discovered a blood clot that killed him instantly, no pain. We walked to a restaurant, had breakfast, bought dessert for later. We went back to his place, to sit with our other kitten, the brother. Laid on the futon. Watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Ate chocolate. Cried.

Yesterday I thought my cat had died. I was getting ready to leave, and he had been feeling sick, scheduled for a vet appointment for today. I wanted to check on him before I left, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I called and called, and he wouldn’t respond. Almost running through my apartment, I was in tears. Where could he hide? Didn’t cats hide when they were about to die? Why couldn’t I find him? But I did. And my cat was not dead. He is still not dead. He is fine. I am fine. Fine.

When you have mostly forgotten, have accepted, have moved on, and are happy and easy with your memories, when you think only with good faith on your past, when you are not sad just for sad’s sake, when you are fine, these things will happen to you. You will cry in your apartment over the cat you did not find in time. You will cry for the cat to whom you did not say goodbye. This is life reminding you of its balances. This is the future pushing you into your past. This is the present resenting your presence. This is life giving you a snow day, and killing your cat. This is. This. His-its-shit. Sometimes I hate this.

I’ve been watching too much Freaks and Geeks.

In the third grade, I had what was probably my first public breakdown. Janelle T, whose last name I completely remember, but who I will not name in entirety here for fear of Google search retribution, told me that I was a bad friend. I can’t remember why she said it, except that she was rich while I was poor, she was beautiful while I was not, she was thin while I was fat, she was popular, and I was, well, poor, ugly, and chubby. So when the new kids, Doni and David (twins!) joined our class, and Doni was my friend, I was ecstatic and Janelle was displeased. Doni eventually moved on, as all new kids who are nice but infinitely more interesting than you do, but Janelle wouldn’t let it go. She whispered to me at the desk I shared with Patrick R, whose name I also remember, who was also an asshole, even in the third grade: “You’re a terrible friend. Don’t you feel bad about that?” I was. I did. I believed.

I remember laying my head on my desk. I remember refusing to participate in activities. But here is what I remember most: Mrs Whitehead, leaning down to me, whispering again in my ear: “Don’t do this. You’re one of my most solid students. You’re not like this. Can you be a rock?” Maybe the exact words are off, but I know she had faith me. I know she told me I could be better, that I could be stronger. So I was. I did. I believed. Mrs. Whitehead gave me detention anyway, one of two times I ever received such punishment in my American schooling. (I got in trouble in Palestine ALL THE TIME, but that’s for another day). I understood why she did it, knew I earned it, though it was an odd feeling. Amidst the other kids who routinely populated the after-school special, I was misplaced. We all knew it. I didn’t belong with Seamus, who pinched my butt, or Robbie, who stole markers (this is totes real, and eerily in line with that Dane Cook skit). I was just passing through.

In the fourth grade I had my second detention. This time for refusing to go to Mass, and spending the hour in the girl’s restroom. Mrs. Paris, who I hated for claiming to never received my yearbook money, and thus denying me a fourth grade yearbook, was not understanding like Mrs. Whitehead had been. She took my denial as disrespect, and I hated her all the more. I cried when she denied me my yearbook. It was $12 I had painstakingly saved, the kind of money my parents thought was unnecessary spending, and thus were reluctant to give me, but I wheedled anyway. I took detention round two like a champ though. I decided to never let people like that see me cry again. I kept my word. My emotional distance in American schools continued before and after the Palestine years, until approximately the second year of my undergraduate degree, when I finally began to make friends again, began to feel.

It’s easy to make my middle school years the stuff of TV sitcom–I attended Catholic school until the fifth grade, when I moved to Palestine for four years. At HR, we couldn’t afford the tuition, and received complete aid from the Church. I even had breakfast and lunch vouchers. Everyone knew we were the charity cases, and they laughed at this, as they laughed at my father, who sometimes picked us up after school in a station wagon, driving it through the enormous pond that would form in the parking lot after precipitation. They called it the Yacht. They laughed too, at our funny contributions to school lunches, at the fact that my mother didn’t come to class for our birthdays, at our convenience store where they shoplifted, at my older sister, who didn’t date, and was therefore clearly a lesbian (oops. Wrong sister, HR). With a few minor exceptions, my memories of school are unpleasant, and bred in me a remoteness and an ease with disappointment that I carry until this day.

I think what I miss most about my girlhood is my gullibility. My willingness to take people at exactly face value, with no suspicion regarding their motives, or their truth. I believed so much, so readily–willing to take both praise and criticism in equal measure. These days, I’m told I’m bad at taking compliments, which is certainly true. And though it rarely happens (insert massive ego here), I’m equally bad at taking criticism. What I am good at, what I excel in most, is finding ways to say “I’m not a part of this. I won’t do this. I am putting my head down.” Of course, now it’s masked as distance and judgment, the farce of adulthood. Sitting on the sidelines of this or that affair, in the wings of social events and community stages, the whispers in my ears are mine alone: “Don’t you wish you were better than this? Stronger? Don’t you feel bad about this place?” I do. I wish. I believe.

song of herself

I rescued the bananas. They were so sad, sitting on the top of the garbage in my friends’ kitchen, tossed before their time, to accommodate their purchaser’s week long absence. I didn’t want to take them–I didn’t. Already beginning to turn brown, what could I do for them? Wait for the winter of their life, before resentfully forcing them into some banana muffin scenario. For now they sit coyly on my table, in a bowl I threw for the very purpose of housing fruit. The bananas tricked me, made me accountable and my guilt over their presence is disproportionately huge. I didn’t even buy them. Why should I care?

It’s been four weeks since my return to the States. Everything is my apartment is bananas: the books I bought for school but haven’t read; the rugs in the bathroom I keep forgetting to wash; the MacBook that taunts me with its light-up keyboard, begging to be put to better use than Facebook status updates.  I have sat down to write hundreds of times since coming back. I blink at the screen. I look at my nails. I eat a snack. I eat twenty. But there is no story to be told, and I learned my writing lessons well. What is the narrative arc? Who are the characters? It can’t just be a free-fall of feelings, an avalanche of emotion.

And then I chide myself, because I have *done* things since coming back. Surely I have. I drove 3 hours to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a gay resort. I baked muffins, crumb cakes, pies. I watched Eclipse, Jersey Shore. I clocked hours on my RA position. I caught up with some of the amazing, important women in my life. I mailed packages. I went to a party where five minutes into meeting her, a woman informed me of her support and affection for the IDF. But these things are unrelated, no consistent strand but the overbearing “I” of it all. So I decide to be less like myself, challenge myself to ignore my overly rational tendencies and do the opposite of the thing I think I should do. I go out when I want to stay home, I go to my favorite bar when I should work. I flirt with people who are vulnerable, I have sex with an old friend and enjoy it. I research publishing companies that work with creative non-fiction, and imagine ways to take a year off from graduate school.

And when I convince myself that perhaps I can be less like me, more like someone interesting, someone with a story, someone adventurous and lovable and unpredictable rather than reliable and boring,  I rescue the bananas. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Practical and unemotional, but it’s so like me, I hate it. I hate their stupid curved bodies in my beautiful round bowl, which previously housed Sour Patch kids and the cord for my external hard drive. Now that they are here, I can’t possibly turn away from them, let them rot without some kind of resolution. I owe them my time, attention, as I owe all things: the books, the rugs,  the blog, the friend, the graduate school.

And because in all of this, what I want most is for someone to rescue me, take me home, make me safe and loved and beautiful and wanted, I envy them even as I loathe them. And because I hate that I have wants and needs I can’t fulfill on my own, I will take care of the bananas and books. I will deny the wasteful desire to throw them out, the selfish desire to put off my life and my inevitable boring self for a little longer. I come back to me, indulgent but uninspired, efficient but exacting. Sure, I hate the bananas. But ultimately it’s me I can barely look at.