history

“i want to worship your body” he whispers against my ear, urgent and throaty. i feel his breath travel lobe to fingers, curling around the steering wheel of my 4 door luxury sedan and i would kick this seat all the way back if i wasn’t parked in the middle of town, cop cars circling the lot at 3am this warm summer saturday. “i want to worship your body” he whispers against my mouth and how can i resist such desire? what sane person would deny such a reasonable request? but the headlights of yet another slow ambling car glint against the ring on his left hand and this situation is impossible. still, i go back for one more kiss and another and another because when was the last time my body was worshiped? i can’t recall feeling an out pour of desire so tailored to my body, to me. i hear myself trying to explain the unexplainable and it’s not much out loud, is it? but it is everything, and i am a teenager swayed by this ferocious lust, the unfamiliar thrill, remembering that it’s possible to be wanted.

nineteen and dating a handsome boy whose skin glows after he leaves the gym and his body is /cut/ before i started using the word cut to describe such manicured beauty. his hair is dark, almost black, and it falls over his face when he leans down into me and says “baby, we have time.” so we do and the taking is full and fast and he barely moves to lift me up against his warm body which smells always like tide. i am so light with him. so light he is careless and i don’t remember the first time we had sex, the first time i ever had sex, because i got so tired of his asking that i just accepted and though i like it now i can’t remember, can’t remember when or what i lost, if anything.

fourteen, walking down a street in palestine, the year before i move back to the states. it’s valentine’s day, and though i’ve spent most of the night dancing with someone else, it’s rami who walks me home in the dark. holds my hand, kisses my cheek when i get to my door. can you imagine? 14 and so flustered by the chastest of kisses. he is sweet and jubilant and thinks we’ll be together forever. i can’t tell him how i’m leaving. how could i? he’ll know eventually and the shine of being so loved will tarnish as surely as the silver tea pot that travels across oceans twice, but never gets used.

Day Two

Last night I discovered NaPoWriMo, which is the abbreviation for National Poetry Writing Month. This prompt is from their website: Write a poem that incorporates the titles of three books you have in your house.

/Library/
Between L4 and L5, my spine
is slipping. Against gravity I hold
this body up but my seams crack
so I fold each limb in like paper
until I am bound in my own borders.

—–
Uh. It turns out I’m bad at following prompts. Oh well. Also, since it’s been 6 years for your loss, and would have been 6 years of our gain, and it’s been so long…I miss you dear. I hope you’re well.

existential crisis, take two.

As an instructor I am many things: feminist in politics, casual in presentation, strict in policy, detailed in assignments, sometimes funny, sometimes flip, sometimes focused in discussion. I like to think that I’m a good teacher. I can summarize difficult arguments in brief and clear language. I try to make space for students who wouldn’t normally speak to be heard. Though it is cliche and sentimental, I genuinely believe something powerful can happen in the classroom. I believe that people change how they think, or begin to change how they think about the world. And I generally perceive that change for the better.

This week, I was something in my classroom that I have never explicitly been before. This week, I spoke to my students not as an informed and (inasmuch as possible, objective) instructor, but as a Palestinian who had lived under occupation; as someone who approached the topic from a specific political perspective, with ideas grounded in theory as much as feeling, and with definite opinions regarding action and change. I have never done this. I have never been a Palestinian first. While I am unclear on how to describe that position in concrete language, I suppose the closest I can say is that to my students I stood in for Palestine. For many, I was likely the only Palestinian they had seen in person, or with whom they could converse. For many, I was the only indication that something like Palestine existed, that it was populated by real people, and that it was under occupation.

I feel incredibly conflicted about holding this position. I was clear when I began my sections that I would be happy to pursue our regularly scheduled activity. I was clear that if this was undesirable or unproductive, we could move on. And while it was productive and interesting for many of my students, I could tell that one student in particular was not comfortable, was not OK. While I wouldn’t characterize her posture as hostile, I would say that it was defensive. Now, 24 hours later, I still can’t shake the feelings of vulnerability and anxiety I felt in the classroom. What a curious effect of oppression, that in acknowledging your own personhood, you might feel guilty. Guilty to take a “biased” position, guilty to claim space, guilty to make those who would support your oppression feel at all uncomfortable. I know that this guilt is obviously complicated by the fact that I am her instructor, and we exist in a relationship that is unequal. And while I prefaced and reiterated multiple times that I was speaking that day primarily as a person with a clear position, rather than facilitating discussion and underlining concepts with no position other than conveyor of course materials, I feel so…icky. Did I do something wrong? Was this the correct course of action? Should I have stuck to the lesson plan? Isn’t it OK sometimes to be honest, to be me, to be Palestinian? I know that neutrality is a farce. I know that even when I play instructor, my personhood and politics don’t disappear, but neither are they as explicit as they were yesterday. I am afraid that I have alienated her. I am afraid that I was too transparent. I am afraid that the room will be altered irrevocably after this. I am afraid of my anger at feeling afraid in the first place. I am afraid I am not cut out for this job. I am afraid that now that I have been a Palestinian first, I will not be able to lie to myself– I was one always, throughout all things. I am afraid to be Palestinian. I am afraid to be.

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?

retreat to move forward.

I’ve heard many people bemoaning 2010, and eagerly grasping at the new wisps of 2011. I get it. 2010 was a hard year; they are all hard years. The past year was wildly rewarding and deeply depressing for me, often at the exact same moments. The memories are hazy and blurry, but I can recall the feelings well: the apathy of January, a body blizzarded and grey by the bleakness of Michigan winters; the exhilaration of February, a brief moment of sun and sex outside US borders; the freedom of May after the end of classes, the anxiety of doing nothing at all; the heartbreak of June in my homeland, the unsettledness of July after my return; the rush of August to prepare for the term; the desire of September for company, for loneliness to abate; the ache of October as July and September carried still; November brought newness; December replayed all these months, in a whirlwind of emotion–leaving me exhausted and anticipating the new year. What could 2011 bring that 2010 failed to mention?

When we visited Palestine in the Summer of 1999, I was reunited with my old boyfriend. The night before our return to Amman, Rami and I sat in the cool night air, under the grapevines in the walkway to my house. We sat there for hours, talking and reminiscing. This was a time when people would walk by my house that I would know, and they would stop in to chat for a bit for continuing on their way. So there we were, two silly young things imaging our love impossible–born witness by casual passerby’s. My mother, who eschews the sentimental, eventually demanded I come inside and start packing. I went up to chat with her briefly while Rami waited. I said I just needed a little more time, I just wanted a little more. Brisk and succinct, she suggested that 10 minutes or 10 hours would change nothing. I was going, and he was staying. Fin. So I bid farewell to Rami, grazed his cheeks with my lips, a standard parting gift. His cheeks were soft, his lips rough against me. Older now, we knew this had a finality that our first goodbye lacked.

There are some things I cannot relinquish. The notion of our love. The notion of my love for G. The memories of G and our relationship. Friends I would have not wished to lose, but had to for my own survival. People I loved too much to be continued to be hurt by. I love them still, quietly holding on to our memories, lingering with the ghosts of our friendship. They stand in stead for newness, for those people and places I’ve abandoned with ease for never have becoming entangled.

On the brink of 2011, I swayed and bopped in the gay bar of my hometown, with old friends and new. Some of my ghosts followed me there–mutual acquaintances reminding me of folks I had held at bay for a while, intoxicated with the newness of others who I would have also abandoned, were it not for friends who stood me still long enough that I would stand there by choosing. The visit didn’t ruin my evening. It didn’t make me unreasonably sad. Over time the losses I’ve incurred and initiated are receded to a slight throb in my heart when provoked, exaggerated if I allow myself to dwell. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. New Year’s was no time for this sadness. Or was it? Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? I don’t want to forget though I have moved on. I don’t want to forget though they have moved on. I linger here, too, knowing the memories enrich me even as they sometimes hinder my forward movement. I won’t say good riddance to the past year. I hold it’s hand in the new year, looking on it fondly, my hand warmed by its presence. It’s an old song, but a classic.

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.

the HoJo diaries

The First Night
I started the drive hung-over. Not exactly. In the words of David Cross: I wasn’t that pleasant euphemism, hung over. I was FUCKED UP. And though I felt better about 3 hours in, by the time the drive was over, I was as dazed as I had been when I started. I have driven 11 or so hours, alone. Out of Michigan, across Ohio, across Pennsylvania, into New Jersey. I spent the last half hour in my car, circling the same few blocks over and over again, because my GPS, Susan, does not understand that in order to make a left turn, you have to go right first. In fairness, how could she know? I certainly didn’t. Or maybe she knew and wasn’t telling me. In either case, I shut her down and did it the old fashioned way, asking the kind woman at the Hyatt how to get to a “rival” hotel. I use scare quotes because the Howard Johnson of New Brunwick is the shadiest hotel at which I’ve ever stayed. Even at midnight, I feel skeevy about the stairwells, the outdoor carpets. The indoors aren’t much better. A sad, thin mattress; outlets that don’t have three prongs; a table that wobbles; a hair-dryer that doesn’t turn on; and oddly, a small veranda. At 65$ a night, I suppose I can’t complain but I do anyway, elaborate strings of profanity to the empty room.

What was I doing here? A conference. On affect. Of course. This is the problem with studying feeling: you can drive across the godforsaken terrain known as Ohio, and still not be far enough away. Like a storm cloud that travels with you, all the things I’d tried to suppress leaked out in spurts and before long I am crying again, the fourth time today. By now, the tears are less emphatic and overdone, sliding down my cheeks with little care: more habit than affect. I try to tame my sadness in the dim lights of the HoJo (how the hotel *actually* abbreviates itself); it becomes manageable. A small tightening around my heart only when I let my guard down, instead of an incessant squeezing. Spent, I collapse onto the bed but can’t stop thinking. I read the remainder of a Nora Roberts novel and finally fall asleep, uninterrupted until the morning.

Day One
The next morning, I take my time getting up. The HoJo fairs worse in the daylight. While clean, there is an unmistakable dinginess in the textiles, on the plastic basin of the tub and toilet. I make due, because there is nothing else to make. The hair dryer isn’t working, so I bend over the heater. I thread my computer cord from the bathroom, the only room with open outlets, let alone three prong, across the room to the table. I get dressed, put on makeup. I’m starting to get hungry, so I venture out to the conference site. I think I’ll park my car, and then walk around the campus, which will surely have coffee shops, sandwiches and the like. I am wrong. The Women’s studies complex on the Brunswich (a funny mistake I’m keeping), is in the middle of fucking nowhere, as far as I can tell. I walk around for an hour until I find a student center with an a la carte cafe. I eat outside, for the weather is perfect today, and revel in the rare feeling of accomplishment: I made it. I found food. Things will be OK.

The first day of the conference goes well: I learn that Rutgers is going to feed us for the rest of the conference, and am glad again that I made the decision to come. It also goes quickly, only one graduate student panel before the first keynote, David Eng. When Eng speaks, he is composed, comprehensive, elegant. He speaks about race and reparations, psychic and legal. I don’t pretend I understood everything, but I’m struck by his eloquence, optimism. When I get up the nerve to introduce myself the next day, he is charming in person as well. Graciously learning my name, gushing about how brilliant my advisor is. Turns out, theorists are people, too.

We end shortly after David’s talk, so I take my car back to the HoJo, getting lost for the last time in New Brunswich. When I get back to the hotel, I can’t bring myself to do actual schoolwork, so I read another Nora Roberts, the last in my latest trilogy, order a pizza, over-tip the driver and find comfort, unexpectedly in my isolation and solitude. Flushed from Eng’s brilliance, and transported temporarily to an Irish landscape of love in Robert’s, the lack of love, REAL love, is suppressed for another night.

Day Two
The conference starts unreasonably early. So from the outset, I’m already slammed, and the content and breadth of the day is no relief. There are 3 panels, 2 keynotes. One by Jasbir Puar, a second by Leo Bersani. At lunch I finally make friends, sitting on the shaded steps of the adjacent building. Bersani sits with us, and he easily becomes the most lovable, graceful, dapper surprise of the conference. He is frail and brilliant, thoughtful and kind. It’s hard to express how amazing he was, talking with me about my drive, Flint, movies. Straining to hear our conversations, picking at the well-worn hole in the elbow of his sweater, wiggling his toes in his chocolate suede loafers, which look like fancy house shoes. I’m so charmed by his demeanor, his wit.

The affects studied at the conference are mostly negative, while the atmosphere is convivial, collegiate. I find my mood wavers with each presentation, resulting mostly in sublimity. I am awed, humbled, stuttered into silence by the passion in the room, the brilliance of watching these virtuosos chit chat as though over Sunday brunch. After dinner, a beer, and small talk with my new friends, I return once again to the HoJo. This night, I stay up reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The night is Hitchcock, the hotel the perfect ambiance for reading Freud’s probing work. I might not buy into psychoanalysis, but that night my dreams are wild and vivid, felt in the fiber of my skin and I wake up tingling, out of breath–the taste of someone I just met on my lips. In dreams, I find the attachment I crave, my mouth muttering her name into hers, over and over.

Day Three
Is it an oxymoron to say it’s another beautiful day in Jersey? I’m being too cruel. Aside from the driving, Jersey has treated me well. Today, on this last day, the weather is perfect. The agenda is full, but less intense than the prior day. Two panels, followed by lunch, followed by Lauren Berlant’s keynote, and a concluding panel of the conference’s four major speakers, reflecting on what they learned, with what they hope to move forward. The vibe is, again, jovial and celebratory, due in small part, to the beer and wine brought out early. I couldn’t say what I’ve learned in these three days, so much volleying around my brain. I grapple as best as I can with the complexity, share a cigarette with my conference friend, have a last laugh with Leo. I have a sad sense of finality when he leaves the conference, wondering like my father would, I suppose, if he’ll make it much longer. He seemed so lightly tied to the earth, at odds with his brazen, defiant, wildly present writing.

I return to the HoJo with wry affection. My plans for the evening have fallen through, so I improvise: I’ll take a nap and get up and read Freud instead. My dreams are vivid again; I imagine in sleep that I am opening a door to a well-lit, buttery yellow kitchen, and when I pass through it my eyes open to the off-white popcorn ceiling. It’s dark out now, and the door to my veranda is cracked open. I swing it wide, take in the cool night air–prepare myself to again fill the hours, push away the tenderness in my chest cavity, muddle through the tedium. I echo Liz Grosz’s closing remarks, an idea that has saturated the presentations: every ontological project has an affective register. And the affective is neither about optimism or pessimism. It is simply making life livable. I promise myself I’ll remember this tomorrow, on my long long drive, out of New Brunswich, through Pennsylvania, through Ohio, into Michigan: all alone. I am not optimistic, but I can do this. Alone if needs be, I can live.

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.