And I Am Marie Of Roumania

sketch

2011-09-09T15:33:00.003-04:00

“I can take the next customer at this register.” Refrain of the dully indifferent check-out girl, in faded apron and overtight jeans, her muffin top unmasked. The lives of seven shoppers brighten as she says so, and saunters over with her rubber coil of keys. She works whatever highly special function she’s been trained at to bring the mechanism back online—to smash oapen, smash shut the cash drawer—to illuminate the square that advertises number 6 is open now. Seven shoppers’ killer instincts are engaged. Their knuckles white with tension on their gallon jugs of milk.

The first to move is not the first in line; he is the most tenacious. He is the fleetest on his feet. And he veers his compact cart in her direction, a swift diagonal. And he leaves behind the dimwits and the dopes, the saps, the sows, the sluggish also-rans. Nevermind the honor codes, he says, and goes for glory. No, I say. I shake my head. I do not love New York.

the twenty seven year old second start

2011-09-05T18:32:00.009-04:00

And so it begins.

A year ago last week, I moved to Florida. I wore the amulet of Job around my neck, was visited by plagues of locusts first, then boils. I'd just seen my entire adult life thrown into cardboard boxes, fumigated, stored. I rolled one suitcase deep.

I made it a month before I flew back up the eastern seaboard—no money, no apartment, no job, no plan. Turns out, that was the best decision I have ever made. For four months I did little more than work a little, write a lot, and bend myself to mindful pretzels on the yoga mat. In December, I met Jack. He was there for every postmark of my application envelopes, there helping me make line edits at the eleventh hour. And then he stuck around. Cue the most magical winter of my life.

Then the discs went, and, really, that was hard. Still is. But, turns out, I meant more to him than dancing, and so I scarred my forearms making rhubarb pie.

He left in June. I'd been accepted then, been to the admittees' reception, and taken out the 100k in loans. I kept my pedals to the metal and spent one too many summer evenings watching Netflix television from my single bed.

I went to Europe. Got lost in France, then found in Ireland. Somewhere in between, I saw Berlin. I wrote the front fifty pages of a mystery. Went heather picking with the man I love, then had to leave him there.

I flew back into Newark, and cried the whole way home from culture shock. I had three weeks to group my ducks together for their onward march. A list of unfortunate things occurred, in rapid succession, then were solved. I got booted from my humble closet sublet and forced to find myself an actual room.

I sit there now, typing to the Internet. I have a desk, a proper bed, even a closet in which to store my things (they no longer hang above me from the ceiling rail). My Jack came back; I met him at the airport with a little paper sign.

And tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) I put my money where my mouth is. My first firstdayofschool since January 2002. I'm underqualified and thoroughly unorthodox, but here I come, Columbia, ready for that MFA.

Last week, under the rotunda, we were all convoked. I drank a plastic party cup of Chardonnay and mingled with the elbow-patched professors on the lawn. I purchased all twenty-four of this semester's books.

All that remains is waking up and getting on the train. I miss my mother—how she'd lay out all my clothes, then snap a picture of me trotting out the door. I was little then, and fatter, dwarfed slightly between bike helmet and clunky Buster Browns. I rode off on my banana seat like that about a dozen times, once for each new school.

The lunches, though, I packed myself.

hurricane irene: sunday afternoon.

2011-08-28T12:04:00.003-04:00

Woke up to sirens and howling winds at five am. We never lost power, but everyone else did, and it sounded like the end of days. No tornadoes, no witches, no flying trees.

By noon, we've seen the worst of it. The city reels and recovers. New Yorkers, we are tough as nails.

We celebrate with cinnamon rolls.

hurricane irene: saturday evening

2011-08-27T21:29:00.002-04:00

Four girls, two tiny dogs, tuna melts, TBS, and two bottles of Malbec.

It has started to wind and started to rain.

hurricane irene: friday night.

2011-08-26T23:12:00.003-04:00

Jesus is coming.

This is the refrain as I walk up Broadway, towing a rolly-suitcase which I cannot lift up or down the subway stairs, on my way to Washington Heights to weather the weather. The storm won't come for hours yet, days even, and yet the natives rip the batteries right off the rack, and buy the groceries out of bottled water and loaves of bread.

The atmosphere is manic, the sky an eerie, cloudless blue. The food lines are halfway to the meat counters.

Three girls and I stock up on peanut butter and Oreos. We buy two gallons of water and six bottles of wine. We order enough sushi to satisfy a football team. And here we sit, in the apex of our youth, at our devices, soaking up the screen time before the power and the wireless quit.

This is the moment, between Categories, between evacuation zones, where we miss our boyfriends and are not yet afraid.

dive naked, hitchhike home

2011-08-13T17:41:00.009-04:00

I would forfeit any single smell in NYC for one whiff of peat fire on a misty afternoon. I miss there and him so much my limbs are aching for them both, though that could be from jet lag and the flight. Hard to believe I started this day sixteen hours ago in Dublin, and yesterday morning I spent underneath a pale blue quilt, eating soda bread.

I don't do well with change. I fall in love too readily, too fast. I've wanted to stay in every place I've ever traveled to (and some I've never seen), but the fact that Donegal and Jack exist is near enough to break my heart.

To walk across the stone-walled realm of Inishowen is to step into a dream, a place I never dared to hope to find. The ground is hopelessly green, each field lusher than the last, and spotted here and there with cows and sheep. The sea is grey and blue and huge, the horizon far, the clouds low slung. The hills loom straight into the water and the sky. They are mossy, lichened, laid with rocks and scree. When the sun shines, it makes the country glow. It cascades from cloudbursts like a miracle.

I took his hand and trudged with him along the path, then off and over a barbed wire fence and into pastures. We tromped, avoiding bulls and rams, until we scaled the heather patches to the top, and looked down at the sun-scaled sea beneath us, acres down. There was not a soul for miles to see us there.

He picked me a bouquet of hardy blooms, and tied it up with braided grass. "Bushcraft," he explained, all rugged grin, adding in a thistle sprig he'd hacked free from its cluster with a sneakered kick. He found me a mushroom, a shell. A thousand treasures that I cannot name.

We made our way through grasses to the sea. Another barbed wire fence. We walked home against the sunset, sucking peat smoke through our grateful pores. We drank unhurried tea with bread and jam. He built a fire. We sat there in our woolen jumpers with our single malt, nothing but the sound of crackling flames.

After dinner, we read the paper by the fire. He folded his in half, took off his glasses, and lay along beside me—his head on my chest, his arms curled in my hair. We slept like that until the fire died.

For three straight mornings, he made breakfast in bed: a tray laden with soda bread and Irish butter, rhubarb jam and whole cream yogurt, tea, fruit, and a flower in a vase. We read, refilled our tea, not getting out of bed for anything except another endless roam.

It took us the better part of forty five minutes to reach the nearest store on foot, a tiny rural post that sold stamps and not much else. Convenience wares, prepackaged loaves of bread. An ice cream freezer half-stocked with frozen fish. We cut down to the water, through a pasture strewn with dung. It was raining as it had for hours—all morning and all afternoon, the wind whistling across the fields. We didn't mind. We were already soaked. We stripped to nothing on our isolated beach, wading in together, hand in hand, negotiating pebbles underfoot as the rain tapped muted nothings on the surface of the sea.

We high-fived and tried to dry each other off, pulling on our soggy layers. Then back up over fence and pasture to the road. A lonely man in an ancient car gave us a lift. "There're no Ghaeltachts left here. Those people all have died." His mother, too, had died just months ago. He told us we could visit him whenever we liked; he lived just past the pier.

We ate fried cod and vegetables, then I made pie. He helped me cut the fat into the flour with a plastic potato masher. Hours later, the discs of rhubarb given way to stewy tartness, we ate hot slices drenched in cream. And watched another film by firelight.

Day three was much the same. We heard the donkeys bray from bed. Only we slept too late to spend all morning with our novels. We tromped up the Mamore Gap to where the rocks get lost in mist. We met more people by the Blessed Virgin shrine. Mary Queen of Heaven, attended as she was by broken candles, soggy jars, a pile of rubbish and a mass of rosaries. Padre Pio guards the well, on St. Egney's site. I dunked my fingers in to bless myself. After all, the lady said, it couldn't hurt.

We went up a little path that turned into a stream, awash with mud, my Ked soles slipping on the stones. We took our shoes off when the path ran out, went squelching up the hill with pants rolled up, the heather nearly three feet deep. He hauled me on a rock to sit and watch the sea across the bogs. Our breath was steaming while we didn't speak.

I couldn't feel my feet the whole way down. He lent his trainers, walked down barefoot while I bounced along beside him. At the bottom of the gap, we traded shoes, then pressed on to the beach while peeling oranges and smiling at the cows.

The beach was a miracle of cliff and sand, the bay vast and peopled just by fishing boats. We sat in total quiet, listening to the waves, smiling that half-swept wistful smile of those whose hearts are breaking out of beauty by itself. A few families arrived for their pre-supper swims. He ran along the beach and then into the water in his underwear—and that was how I wrecked my Irish lingerie: I ran full force into the ice cold sea. Brand new minty silk and peachy lace be damned. I ruined the reveal. Or—rather—not, he said. He'd never seen me look more joyous than I did when I was standing soaking wet in those exquisite panties, holding up my goosefleshed arms into the sky and smiling like the world might end. I fell in love with him again right then and there.

And then once more, some hours later, as the leeks were frying in a buttered pan. The dog who stole the ham right off his plate day one returned to make his final rounds. He'd learned to love us by the trail of lamb bones left for him in hedges, the scent of breakfast sausages. Cheeky, we named him.

Our last dinner. Steak and roast potatoes, last night's pie. We carried the leftover slices to the neighbors and walked right into history. We sat in high backed wooden chairs, painted schoolyard red, and listened to the songs and stories of men in scallycaps and sweater vests.

And then it disappeared into the rear view mirror of the hired cab, the bus from Buncrana, and then to Dublin via Derry. Then airports, flights, landing somewhere else across the world. I cried the whole way home (by way of Newark), and still I hurt for it. I look at the pitiful array of pictures taken and I want to hoarde them for myself. As if it were a secret, kept by him and me. Ireland, I say. As if it hadn't happened. As if it weren't real.

It was never going to be easy coming back alone.

I am a jelly doughnut

2011-08-05T06:13:00.005-04:00

Live however you like; Berlin just doesn't care. I've seen rain fall from a clear blue sky. Real rain, too, long teapot pours of it, like streamers, or very narrow waterfalls.

I don't dry my hair here, or care what clothes I'm wearing. I spend most of the morning writing, the afternoons drifting through museums. I eat four meals a day and one of them is cake.

One rides the U-bahn with an open beer. It is legal to relieve oneself in public, and to be accompanied by as big a dog as one can find. Bull mastiffs wait on leashes by their owners for the nightbus to arrive. This is a city with an infrastructure to put New York to shame. Empty bottles are left beside recycling bins for those who need the extra funds to take away. Unemployment is so high that, on a Tuesday afternoon, the parks are packed with people soaking up the unexpected sun. No one has any money, which makes it all the more civilized to sit on the sidewalk around six pm and have a pilsner. One could live on full-fat yogurt and 3e falafel here for weeks.

The city itself has character. Zones bleed into other zones by tree-lined streets or neon stretches of commercial thoroughfares. We live in ragtag Neukolln, but we danced beside a bridge, next to the Bode Museum, under colored lights on strings with birds alighting overhead. We danced in a restaurant, all wooden tables, wooden walls and floors, while patrons ate their sausages and struedel. And when we grilled in Görlitzer Park, the bleed from all the urban lights was not enough to hide the stars.

No one really rushes for the train.

We snuck into an abandoned East German amusement park, took pictures of the Ferris wheel all but overgrown with weeds, and threatening to sink into a swamp. We barbecued by the terminal at Tempelhof, having filled our backpacks up with beer. We ate at a charming little restaurant by the kirche at Bernauerstrasse, run by an eighty-four year old man who poured our wine with palsied hands, but served a tapas platter seamlessly. I had quarkspeise at the Turkish market and bought bronze earrings in the shape of forks. It's no wonder that I do not want to leave.

I feel grounded here in a way I haven't felt for months.

And Jack, oh Jack. Who still has yet to say he loves me. But who tells me I am glamourous, despite all contrary evidence. Like a Frenchwoman, he says. "You know, she rolls out of bed into a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and ties her hair back with a pencil. That's the kind of glamour you possess."

on frailty and fidelity

2011-07-29T06:44:00.006-04:00

I have the sort of boyfriend who can carry me seated upright on his shoulders. The kind who sweeps me down whole flights of stairs. He is a lifter of heavy things, a manager of impossibly numerous grocery bags.

He is smarter than a whip crack on a winter morning. He looks at the world with his sea glass eyes and assesses it, not merely for style and substance, but moral significance. He believes in the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people for the greatest amount of time, a worldview made manifest by his boundless attention to single mothers' baby strollers and frail old ladies' shopping carts.

He is also fiercely independent. The sort of man who needs to be alone with his thoughts, with his Kindle copy of Proust, with his hills in the Highlands.

I believe he is the sort of man I can trust—with thousands of miles between us or just across a dance floor—but I am merely mortal, and subject to the more vexatious aspects of my sex. I see him beset by girl-fouling floozies, and I have to stop the steam from coming out my ears.

He asks a lot of me, this man. He will be gentle, helpful, overly-solicitous, only insofar as I allow him. And then he cuts the chord. He demands that I be worthy of the respect he gives. He tells me I've no reason to be jealous and expects that I will trust him. He gives me honest feedback and hopes I'll bear it humbly. Now and again, he will morph into an undersensitive creature of the male persuasion, but he is the very first to admit his faults.

When the physical falls apart, and I prove less hardy than my better constitution, he's still there. Back injuries, bladder infections, vicious blisters on the toe... these are just unfortunate matters of nature, he says. And he would gladly weather their momentary effect on whatever fun he's having if it means he still gets to be in a couple with me. His words.

As I sit here typing into my laptop, and he types into his across our desk, rainy Saturday Berlin comes down onto the courtyard maple and our window box of herbs. Life is pitifully short, and love is pitifully painful, but right here in this quiet moment, when we've tidied up the sheets on our mattress on the floor, when we've ducked down to the Lidl for milk and mueslix, and when we've taken silly pictures with the massive celery root I found, every single sacrifice explains itself. I've met the man who lets me be the very best version of myself. The benefits by far outweigh the costs. And I am sure he'd say the same.

berlin, je t'aime, reason 3

2011-07-23T07:08:00.002-04:00

This morning I went to the Supermarkt, nightie tucked into my ripped-up jeans, wearing Jack's flip flops and a sweater. And no one cared. Also, I somehow managed to end up with blue-dyed soap inside my shoes last night. As we walked in the rain, suds squished up from in between my toes. I was unfazed. (However, now my toes are blueberry blue, and look as though they'll stay that way.) Berlin is lovely in the rain.

We made an evening of a grand Sicilian dinner, excellent company and bottles and bottles of wine. Then we retired to an unnamed bar for overly expensive bottles of BIER (at two Euro each).

Lord, I love this town.

guten morgen, glücklich morgen

2011-07-22T06:09:00.006-04:00

Berlin, so far, is one white-walled, stark and lovely flat. A mattress on the hardwood floor, a desk, two chairs, a terrace looking down into the courtyard. One giant maple tree stands guard, tall enough to stand above the rooftops of our six story apartment Haus.

It is drizzling, and has been since I landed. A gentle rain from a sky pale grey and flat. So different from last week in the shocking Azur blue.

He'd stolen me a towel from a hotel last week in Ireland, and he cleared me out a drawer. He was so distracted cooking dinner, he poured mueslix into bowling water by mistake. He added in the pasta anyway. To us, it tasted great (the plump raisins adding particular flair to the tomato pesto).

We snuck to a milonga after midnight, and took the night bus home.

And safely in his arms, I slept.

(Vielen Dank.)

en transit

2011-07-21T00:50:00.008-04:00

I couldn't sleep last night to save my life. The big, sweeping vents kept me awake with their rattling and their teasing of the leaves. Then the moonlight through the window was too bright. Then my stomach churned. But really I was dreaming about Jack.

Or, rather, that I was on a river cruise that crashed. That pitched and heaved in swells among the skyscrapers before shattering through a megastore.

Then I dreamt I couldn't find shoes to wear to the airport—nothing but a pair of tan leather ladies' orthopedic sneakers.

Four, five hours of this restless wishing I could sleep. And now, we wait. Only nine hours to go.

Goodbye again to Ste Maxime, le lovely mer, the ice blue sky, the town that smells of roasting chickens in the afternoons. Hello, Berlin.

here comes the flood

2011-07-19T18:35:00.006-04:00

I'm afraid I don't belong anywhere.

I grew up all over, and it was great. When asked on applications to state my hometown, I usually write "miscellaneous." I'm a child of the open road, and I relish it. I can do great things from a single suitcase. I have done.

Passport and clean panties in hand, I could conquer the world. But 'could' is such another matter than 'will,' and I fear I've lost the latter.

Here I lie in paradise, the pine and herby smell borne through the window on a chilly wind. It rained today, unseasonably for the Côte d'Azur in summer. I wish that were the only reason I felt stir crazy and alone. By cocktail hour, the clouds had cleared, and I walked aimlessly through town, not taking pictures. That's when it hit me: I have come here one too many times. I've taken my photos and eaten my petal cones. It starts to feel like home. And every time I've ever had a home, I've had that place rescinded. I get familiar and I'm forced to move along.

I've been looking all my life for somebody to get me. Just one, to fully and completely understand. I thought Peter and his family did. But perhaps understanding lies all in our perception, and that's the part that changes in the end.

All I know is I've become an adjunct character, another guest with another suitcase in another room. Another place set at the table on the terrace. If my motives aren't clear, my mood not easily discerned, I guess I cannot grumble. It was merely the hope of comprehension that made me feel so easily embraced before.

In thirty six hours, I fly to Berlin and to Jack. I pray I steel myself against imagining another home in him.

disconvention (for the record)

2011-07-17T17:32:00.009-04:00

Peter Pan is in love.

To normal people, this means we no longer need each other. He goes one way with his Grace Kelly Barbie doll bride, and I go mine, into the arms of Jack—until that, too, blows up in my face. But to us, there is no option. He is the brother I never had.

This is a joyful thing, people. I've never seen him like this. She makes him happier than he has been in five plus years. They understand each other on a skin level, from a pheromonal I-need-you place. They talk wedding rings and babies and hallelujah everafter. They are everything together he and I could never have been. And I am thrilled for them. She and I even get along. She gets it. Jack gets it. We've all of us had meals together. The obvious is . . . obvious.

Trouble is, it's not so obvious to anybody else.

But, people, please. We don't just alight in people's lives never to be seen or heard again. We make indents and imprints and are wholly and completely changed. Because of Peter, I am who I am: stupid, blind in love with Jack, embarking on a grad school dream. Because of Peter, I'm (only 708 miles away from him, and not 4000) in the South of France, with people I would lie in traffic for. We may not be blood related, but I've always been the kind of girl to choose her family, and I chose them—a long time ago. They're in the queue. They're on the prayer list (sorry, y'all, I've been reading The Help). And Peter has his faults, don't get me wrong, but so have I.

It makes me sorry for the people who see love in black and white. In yes and no. In no or always. We are no and always, damnit.

Stop telling him to grow up and do it your damn self.

pretty, maybe, but I ain't no beauty queen

2011-07-16T19:51:00.005-04:00

I am a girl who doesn't often paint her toenails. A girl who has never dyed her hair.

I don't wax my snatch or follow the rules. I dress like a school marm or a fisherman's wife.

I've never belonged among girls my own age. And never is this fact more evident than when I see the throngs of them all gussied up in St. Tropez, their four inch sandal heels clacking on the cobblestones, their eyes outlined, their perfume treacle thick. They've got stylish little purses clutched in manicured claws. They smoke, they reapply their lipgloss, they let greasy men get them overpriced cocktails. They enjoy the cheesy music making it too loud to talk, the cheesy chat of rich guys in boat shoes and checkered shirts. They wear things like bronzer. They flatiron their hair.

In short, they care about all manner of women's magazine articles I never bother to read.

And I am thrilled to be unique. To go out as god made me, with or without a bra. In jersey cotton dresses and a grandpa sweater. With earrings and sunglasses bought on the street. But, then again, I'm the girl who has lived out of her suitcase for eleven months.

I look at them and I see pricetags. Brazilian: $80. Mani pedi: $40. Platform wedges: $120. Make up: $100. Make up brushes: $200. Tinted shimmer lipgloss: $22. Spray tan: $30. Eyebrow wax: $15. Crest WhiteStrips: $90. The list goes on, interminable.

The whole cycle requires such maintenance; just looking at them I'm exhausted. When I have extra scratch, I spend it on books. Or food.

Why then, do I feel so frumpy when they pass?

nigh

2011-07-13T08:53:00.005-04:00

I woke up this morning, and my heart was racing.

All these somethings we anticipate will eventually come bearing down upon us in the form of something so simple as an early evening flight to France. The paper days peel off the calendar and float away. We look forward, forward, forward to the moment we will be able to sink into some patch of sand somewhere halfway across the world and say, yes, I am home here. And stop, for once. Just stop.

I suppose it is better to save up all our livinginthepresentmoment for moments like those, for months like this. It is progress being made. The resultant goal, of course, is to keep it up when the real world comes flashflooding back in fall. Like keeping Christmas in one's heart through all the year. All I can do is keep learning. And I do, good lord, I do.

Single digit hours til take off. Single digit days til Jack.

The adventure begins. Glück and bonne chance.

observations

2011-07-10T21:34:00.005-04:00

In winter, we heat our homes to summer unbearable temperatures. In summer, we cool them; we refrigerate ourselves.

Girls with curls want straight hair—and girls with straight want waves.

I complained about this city until I tried to move away.

In busy times, we pray for stillness, but when we get there, we are bored.

It hurts more if you let yourself be scared.

The Buddhist term for suffering, dukkha, has really more a Russian doll of meaning. Unsatisfactoriness, perhaps best among them. The unsatisfactoriness of life. Ennui. The constant, stressful ache we suffer to be somewhere or someone else. Even the translation disappoints; the deep, dark subtlety is lost. We have this hunger, and we do not know its name.

Then again, it is amazing how little time one has for navel gazing, while one is flat upon an injured back.

on lowered expectations

2011-07-04T15:16:00.004-04:00

Today we celebrate the birthday of a good idea, a country founded on our best intentions. With one glance at the newspaper, we see how far we've sunk—but then again, how far we've come. Perhaps the sinking isn't sinister, just a byproduct of good cop/bad cop Time. In growing up, we're given season tickets to the atrophy of dreams. We just get used to change. And not all for the worse.

New York is a ghost town today. The major arteries are cleared, there's very little honking. Some errant sirens and obnoxious music, maybe, but a day of quiet overall. And here I am in an 8x10 foot room, flat out on my messed up back, an ice pack tucked beneath my spine.

A year ago, I was an adult. I had a steady, big girl job, a closet full of shoes, a business card. If you'd asked me then to imagine life like this, making cucumber and cheese sandwiches three nights a week, attempting to write a murder novel, I'd have guffawed. Surely I never had the nads for this before. Surely not the stomach either.

This injury has filled me with such humility, such sense of mortal chance. It used to be good days were judged by how much fun you had, or if you got your way; now any day in which I sit and stand without feeling as though my spine will snap in half is good enough. Days without panic or pain. Nights without nightmares.

I don't care if I get there in a wheelchair, I am getting on that plane. I am going to meet Jack, who has grown his plant across the pond from mine; we've watched their tendrils knit mid-ocean in the Atlantic air. We're just now about to bloom.

and a little rain never hurt no one

2011-07-01T23:59:00.000-04:00

Today is July, and July is Jack.

July is also a reprise of the disc despair (off to a fragile and rather rocky start), involving cancellation of tango practice sessions and trying not to cry. Because, this weekend, at least, is not about me.

This afternoon, at the City Clerk Marriage Bureau, Scott and Jacquie got married. I handed over my Darth-Vader-Meets-Donny-Osmond ID and signed my name as witness for the bride. What is legal tonight will be made real tomorrow, on another rooftop in Bushwick, with me in a grey silk dress, officiating. Then we will have burgers and three-buck-a-bottle Prosecco while the sun sets and I sit out the nuptial tandas, hoping the numbness down my legs recedes in time for me to fly to Europe.

It has all gone by so fast, this summer, my twenties, that brief brush with immortality. In two weeks it will fly by all the faster, to Jack and back home from Jack, into school and out of school, into debt and... still in debt. What a precious thing it is to breathe, to walk, to see.

And even more wonderful: to return home with such a case of weary-hearted blues and find a vase of flowers with a note from Jack that reads only, "Until soon."

well hot n heavy pumpkin pie chocolate candy jesus christ

2011-06-13T22:37:00.007-04:00

When I met Jack, he was just a glint-eyed wallflower. Rimless glasses, witty banter, brogue. I leaned up beside him—against milonga walls—and clasped my hands behind my back, as if concealing purloined fruit, eyes wide and wistful, making as confident a conversation as I could. We danced, but it was afterthought—two songs into the last tanda, one half La Cumparsita—all rhythm play with all this air and space between us.

Come December, he draped his woolen arm around my woolen coat and we walked the awkward way new lovers walk, negotiating gaits. We measured out the space—his pack, my shoulder bag, our strides. We compensated to get closer. He bent his face to mine (too close), to hear me, then was gone. I let him. I dared him. And then, afloat on all those pints of Guinness, the whispered chat until the idle hours, our limbs in innocence leaned into one another, we walked. And it was freezing. Our eyes teared with the cold. Stoplights blurred and it was Christmas—showy 34th Street style. And he let his face linger like that, bent into mine.

We missed I don't know how many traffic lights, I don't know how many little neon walking men.

When I remember Jack, I will remember that. That pillar in Pennsylvania Station. The way he brushed my hear back from my eyes and said how long he'd wanted to do it. "This," he said. "Just this."

I will remember Union Square, the first snow, when we jumped the fence to kiss beneath the trees. I will remember Pelléas et Mélisande, the Met, the way he flipped my ring, and then his quiet kitchen with the spoon-brewed chamomile tea—before the loft door thundered open and my Brooklyn life became forever changed.

It has been one week since he left. Months, maybe, since I scribbled the above on a gutted box of Junior Mints, speeding through the F train tunnel after a showing of Jane Eyre. If I put it down in ink, I thought, it might stay true.

So far it has.

Six weeks until I join him in Berlin. Until then, I concentrate on making my wax wings. Because life is one long leap off of a real tall tower—and I've decided I prefer the feel of falling to the slow way down the service stairs.

please do not disturb or change these sheets

2011-06-09T00:28:00.005-04:00

I love hotels. Of every size and star. For, in them, the act of transit stops. You leave the world. Your life becomes a key card and four walls. You are neither staying, nor going (although, obviously, both). Time is put on temporary hold and, despite its inexorable heavy-booted march, will treat you fairly—with fresh bleached towels and water glasses with wee paper lids. The curtains close, the door frame double locks, and no one ever leaves.

le fin du monde

2011-05-20T19:58:00.006-04:00

Say what you will about this tortuous road we call the twenty-tens, there's an awful lot of life out there to love.

Examples:

Jack sits across from me in a bright red shirt that reads: Give Blood (You Selfish Bastard). The world may end tomorrow, but he and I—at least—will not be among the looters.

The crazy lady in the Bushwick coffee shop (who has been serenading us with hoarsely rendered jazz standards through her toothless lipstick maw) just broke into a chorus of yodels. Full-voiced, flesh tingling yodels.

The last time I came to this cafe, the sidewalks and trees were winter bare. Today, a shock of green bedecks the streets. A pair of heels (yes, heels—and cherry red at that) are strung over a power line outside an artists' shop.

Crazy lady again. She's asked the very patient counter girl if she's aware the world might end. At six o'clock tomorrow. You're a very nice person, she says, before taking her sideshow out into the twilit world.

That's my new favorite word, by the way: twilit. If the world ends tomorrow, I will have found that much marrow at least to suck from out between the piles and piles of bones.

It occurs to me how much we human creatures learn—on our feet, our backs, by the seats of our pants—and how quickly we adapt. Here I am, nine weeks convalescent, damn near weaned off yoga. I dance in fits and painful spurts. The world has stopped its making sense.

How soon we learn to part our hair a different way, to take honey over sugar in our tea, to fit our lives around the current void. I'm eight months living from a suitcase: four pairs of pants, one pair of sheets. One makes one's way. I've spent whole days in the last two months on doctors' tables, in waiting chairs, rubbing my fraying boots across the same industrial carpet pill. We bring ourselves to suffer any ill, provided we survive.

Denied the fruits of our labor, we plant the seeds of contingency. And when those are dashed away by rain, we spend more time crying than it takes to grow another set.

I'm just saying: if the world ends tomorrow, we'll all just have to figure it out. What do we need with a new world when this one has never ceased to change?

when one runs out of roses

2011-05-07T21:16:00.000-04:00

. . . one improvises.

In other news, I danced last night. And woke this morning to glutes abloom with muscle knots. Not to mention one sore-ass sacrum.

Worth it for the first four tandas with Jack in twice as many weeks, and for the way he said, "I don't need to dance with anybody else tonight."

I may be crippled again by Monday, but—ladies and gentlemen—life's too freaking short.

I miss my body electric

2011-04-26T00:14:00.009-04:00

Since gone are my ambitious days of yoga and the library, my nights of torso-twisting tanguera body bliss, I've had to fill my time in other ways. First among these ways is trying not to cry. On good days, I am full of what I like to call recovery hope. On bad days, to go two hours without tears is quite the feat. Some faceless and malevolent force has slashed my pillow from the underside, spilling all the down. I replace the feathers with synthetic substitutes, prosthetic hours. In place of practice, I swim laps. In place of logging sedentary hours before the laptop screen, I go to chiropractors to be poked and plied. I see doctors, hoping one will find the fix to bring me back to life. I take deep breaths. I walk at dopy tourist pace. I carry only what I absolutely need, to spare the extra weight. I take elevators. I take cabs. I let my boyfriend carry me up stairs. I lie on my back. I lie on my side. I cramp, I twist. I futilely rub wherever's sore. I watch hours and hours of internet TV.

I am impatient. But I refuse to cease to learn. I've learned to cry alone, so as not to burden friends who've taken up the cause of keeping me afloat. I've learned that even when you're full to effing burst with Grateful, you still can take for granted something simple like the ability to move. And I've learned that there are always silver linings, or—at the very least—unadulterated good to harvest even in the worst of awful times.

Beyond the obvious: I have swimming, I have writing, I have Jack. So I take it like a crack addict, which is to say, one day at a time. I let things unfold in twice the time, I swim my thirty laps a day, and then I try again. The only thing I want (like breathing) is to dance.

(Let it be soon.)

In the interval, I watch—trying to cultivate my writer's observation deck, that infinite expanse behind my eyes.

Whereas before I found my stillness only in the movement, I'm faced now with finding the movement in my stillness.

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap

2011-04-19T01:14:00.005-04:00

To be sure, between the lady part cancer scare and the herniated discs, I have complained a lot of late.

Really, since September, in my self-imposed exile, self-shortened by the crisp call of a Northeast October, I've been riding my one-woman roller coaster through the Depths of Despair. The peaks have been higher than the drops were low, but I screamed bloody murder all the same.

I've struggled with gratitude. Easy to come by at the tops and crests, arms up and face to the blinding sun. Woohoo escapes your lips and all gods and grandeur answer back.

Then the car catches on the hydraulic brakes, your neck jerks, and the fun comes to a complete and semifinal stop. Five weeks pass in slothdom and sedentary fever. You wonder who you are without all that you have worked so goddamned hard to be grateful for, those big yellow life rafts that steer you through your self-created shipwrecks. How easy it is to lose face, to lose footing.

Four months ago, I fell for a man who's brought me nothing but blessings. Abundance in Bohemia, a living fit for kings. And that man appears to have the patience of ten. Note how he cares for me, carries me down subway stairs, ferries me in service lifts and . . . (forgive me if I gloat) breakfasts me in bed.

I write while he writes. I sleep while he dances. So what if I crane my face away at three am to cry myself to sleep—the very next day he dries my tears. This too shall pass. I'm young and vital and my back will heal. Today the Quackopractor even let me swim.

(Moving through the YMCA pool, I am exultant.)

grounded

2011-04-07T00:31:00.004-04:00

I've stopped counting the days.

I've also shot to hell the theory that says I write best when I'm miserable, because—hell, take away tango, yoga, etcetera and I barely know who I am. Add the mandatory five pounds I've gained (so far) from fat lady rest, and there's not much left in me for lemon squeezing.

On the upside, my friends are really good to me. (Not that I feel guilty about this . . . after two ugly break-ups at the hands of emotionally retarded fuckwit fortysomethings, two Plagues of Locusts and one quarter life crisis, followed almost immediately by a brush with the big C .)

And on the down, we still don't have a diagnosis. Could be hip or back or gluteus medius. Could need surgery, could need six more weeks of rest. Could need ice, could need heat. Could respond to stretching, could get worse.

And here I sit, lumpy, losing muscle definition, losing patience, losing my grip. Paying for cabs I can't afford to ferry my gimp ass across Manhattan. Picking fights with the scary version of Jack that lives in my head and will never love me.

I'm not out of optimism yet, though. Just, almost out. May the MRI bring answers!

the healing power of pessimism

2011-03-28T14:09:00.007-04:00

Having not been raised religious, my guilt muscle seems disproportionately defined. I shy from sloth and rage and all those sins, even while I tell my friends they ought not bother with such parochial concerns.

If I practiced what I preach, I would have a lot more fun.

Be that as it may, I do not enjoy convalescence. An afternoon is one thing. A hungover Sunday with fettucine alfredo is another. A prescribed ten day hiatus from all activity is about to kill me.

Day one: prosecco followed by pudding cake. Pain.

Day two: overdid it—courtesy of work, class and the NYPL. Discovered chemical burns caused by Thermacare patches. Thanks, Universe.

Day three: more library (but hell, at least I was sedentary), Paganini caprices at Carnegie Hall with Jack, then late night Bedford biergarten. Took a lot of taxis, rode the service lift. More pain.

Day four: bed, followed by pasta, followed by bed. Less pain.

Day five: spent three fifths in bed, but spent the other two limping and seizing from stem to stern, blinking back tears. Lots of pain. Thought it would be a good idea to meet Jack at Roko. I was mistaken. (Don't worry, I didn't try to dance. Just sat at the front desk trying not to cry.)

Here we are at the close of day six and the situation continues to spiral. I've gained five pounds, choked up in front of my boyfriend, and had to postpone work until seven pm because I couldn't put weight on my left leg when I woke up this morning. I'm sick to death of the sound of myself complaining, sick of calling in favors, and sicker still of saying thank you to those who give and give and give. I'm afraid they must be sick of me.

I've never been good at asking for or accepting help. But I'm getting great at gratitude.

I'm saying this now, in case the Universe is listening in: please just fix my back. Restore me to my yoga mat, in tango shoes, where I belong. And to the arms of Jack.

on the fragility of existence

2011-03-25T15:32:00.006-04:00

Point of fact: I have a newfound patience for the elderly and the impaired.

Never again will I curse in exasperation as some hunchbacked or otherwise limping soul struggles its way down the subway steps, holding the rail for dear life, thus causing me to miss the R train.

There will always be another R train. Moreover, that simple schlep can be both daunting and excruciating for the in-any-way infirm. Since I sprained my hip, I've come to dread the simplest exertions made necessary by life in NYC: that easy twelve block walk, the madcap dash to catch a train, the idea of being on one's feet from dawn to dawn . . .

On the bright side: I was sent to a charming young orthopede named—shityounot—Dr. DuChey (please withhold your snickers til the end of the post; it's not pronounced that way), who took x-rays and determined the problem to be soft-tissue (and thereby not bone) related. He prescribed ten days of Fat Lady Rest: no tango, no yoga, no stairs, no . . . "et cetera." In essence, I'm to eat bonbons in bed. Alone.

On the brighter side: I had a hilarious run-in with my former boss while wearing my paper examination bloomers (see above). Followed by a trip through the waiting room clutching the aforementioned shorts and exclaiming, "Yeah, you want a piece of this."

And, on the brightest side: with me was the Waldorf to my Statler, to translate me out of speculative doom—and ply me with Prosecco when all was said and done.

the what-ifs are coming all in red

2011-03-21T18:38:00.005-04:00

Monday night, forty four degrees.

A doubting night. For every blessing a riddle left unsolved. I think I love him, now what? I'm going to Columbia, now how will I pay for it? I've sprained my hip, now how am I supposed to dance?

To add insult to injury, it's Spring. Or, at least, it was. This morning there was snow, and then the piercing tendegreesfromfreezing rain. I stayed home last night with my spasming joint and Jack went out to dance. He said stay, but I was on the train by midnight, turning tail. I am afraid of losing him, yet I'm almost sure I will. There is a surplus of uncertainty. An ocean, three months distance—and what if this injury doesn't heal?

I get the feeling every time I thaw, and send my crocus spears to look for light, that there is always going to be another snow. This is my overdeveloped sense of dread.

It's hard to think so much in I when the world is such a bloody mess. Haiti, Libya, Japan. Love falling apart around me, people losing jobs. We all keep carving out our shelves behind the waterfall, I would just like to see some damn waterproofing.

And not just on my shelf, but on yours.

nothing at all to do with elizabeth bishop

2011-03-08T17:46:00.005-05:00

They say jewelry is first to jump a sinking ship.

I can count the major moments in my life by the baubles I have lost, trinkets that verily have leapt from my person to form a trail of breadcrumbs back to all my former selves. There are pieces of me in cities and subway cars across this and nine other countries. I've learned to watch them go with grace—no matter the sentimental value.

I used to keep a box of single earrings, a graveyard or an orphanage, I could never quite decide—you know, just in case that lost pearl stud would find its way back home. Now that I've maximized my minimalist existence, I've been even better at goodbyes. An earring is just an earring, and usually it absorbs a world of pain before it bids adieu.

You see, my mama taught me well. Jewelry will often dive off your body in response to major change and/or the close of questionable relationships. Sometimes we mourn the loss of particular people and pieces, but we always overcome.

A couple months ago, I lost my bracelet. The one with the cedar beads I worry like prayers on airplane trips, my good luck charm since August (when I quit adulthood). There one day and gone the next.

I thought the world had taken my bracelet because it had deigned to give me Jack, so I spent the past two months trying to trust the face that launched my thousand ships. Then I spent the past two weeks trying to will a phantom menace from my lady parts. I've done my downward dogs and my trikonasanas and more than once I've wished I could roll on that comforting clump of beads when I emerge from sleep and showers.

Well, kids, as of this morning I am cancer free. And, at approximately four pm, I found the absent bracelet. Tucked into a fold of the suitcase I took out to pack for an imminent weekend away.

Either I'm about to lose something else (please, lord, anything but Jack) or this is the Universe's way of saying: keep your chin up, kid. You're gonna be okay.

doubting in the digital age

2011-03-06T10:59:00.004-05:00

So here we are, two and a half months in, and Jack has finally acquired a phone.

This means I can reach him if and when I find myself locked out of the loft, or the C train gets stuck and he's waiting by the fountain at the Met, in the cold. It means thoughtful text messages at twenty cents a pop, which I know will be few and far between, but still they make me smile.

It also means abject dread. You see, the phone is the final province of privacy, the primary medium of liars and cheaters the whole world over. Suddenly, I'm on high alert for shady cell behavior. The damn thing rings—and it is a garish ring, the overly obtrusive jangle of the electronic toy—and I panic. As if the hordes of eligible women wanted only this mode of contact to be opened to descend upon him, begging for dates. As if I had him tucked away in a place apart from all this texting and being always available for interruption, and now he flew the coop.

I suppose I ought just to trust that he is not of that unfortunate ilk, and stop searching for trouble before it has time to track me down. But it is hard, still, not to see the little LG mobile device as the foreboding beginning of the end, and I hereby mourn the moment on Friday afternoons when I would turn my phone to silent and surrender to these weekends out of time.

here comes the rug

2011-03-03T02:02:00.006-05:00

If tomorrow brings bad news, this may be the last two am I will greet with optimism—not to mention a belly full of brilliant cuisine. Here I am at the Tour d'Ivoire, keeping Peter Pan and the Fetus company, in the very room in which I spent my very most upsetting month (October Twenty Ten), in my puppy dog pajamas.

I will spend the majority of these last eight pre-diagnostic hours asleep. But even as I drift away, I will do so dreaming of Thomas Keller, mignardises, and Jack.

Goodnight, world. So long and thanks for all the fish.

on dresses and doomsday

2011-02-25T18:17:00.011-05:00

Even at the end of all our girlhood hopes, we are allowed to indulge in one final round of fairy tale dress-up; only at this age we are allowed champagne and the afternoon ends with a three thousand dollar price tag. Bridal boutiques exist not just to sell pounds upon pounds of overpriced lace and tulle, but also to give unmarried ladies that one last sprinkle of fairy dust. To sell them on the vows they are about to take. To remind us to believe.

We are all supposed to grow up eventually. To leave behind the schoolyard brooders in favor of a more stable mate, a man who will agree to grow up with us. In this way, babies are made and houses are painted; family portraits fan out across wide summer lawns. We trade in our Tinkerbell wings for something more sensible and then, well . . . may the next adventure be kind to us.

Call me a cynic, but I believe I've stopped believing. In true love, in marriage—or, more particularly: in one man's ability to say "I do" and follow through—for longer than feels convenient. I imagine all the happy endings and the honeymoons, then fast forward to the part where the erstwhile bride has to start all over again in middle age, pulling herself out of the darkness with banal activities and banana coladas while he reinvents the wheel. I dream—oh but I dream—of the man who'll show me otherwise.

That said, my dear friends K and J are both due for a trip down the aisle, on the sooner side of someday, and both have asked me to stand up there beside them. This honors me; I am honored. There could be no higher hopes than for these two unions. Ironically enough, I believe in them.

Two things have forced me to confront my mortality this week: first, the sangria hangover of doom, and second, the biopsy scrape of the lady-parts that leaves me to a week's worth of potentially pre-cancerous limbo. Throw in global warming, world unrest, and any number of asteroids likely to slam into Earth by the year 2039, and you get the feeling life is very short.

As I type this, I'm working across from Jack. He is frowning over his ancient iBook, jiggling a corduroy pantleg, staring hard at the screen through wire rim glasses as he tries to parse a thesis together out of paragraphs. His hair is mussed, his scruff is overgrown, and he is the handsomest thing I've ever seen. His eyes are sea glass green and invariably kind. When he touches me, I swoon like they used to do in movies, the doe-eyed heroines, sharp-tongued vixens in stockings with seams down the back and round-toed heels—Katherine Hepburn into someone worthy's arms. When he touches me, he means it.

If all this were to go away, the boyfriend, the bohemian renaissance . . . reality . . . I've found the peace that says: but at least there was this. There were good times, with mothers and fathers, with friends. Margaritas on the sidewalk on Second Avenue, cupcakes and champagne. There were travels to four out of seven continents, and the pictures to prove it. There were old friends and new friends and people who, when the hour cried for help, had my back. There are kindred spirits to be found, even past your prime, girls you can speak to like sisters and drink sangria on a Tuesday night like a couple of coeds in Cancun. There are women you can go to dinner with who won't mind if you cry into your moules frites the whole way through. And there is Peter Pan, who maybe doesn't always say the right thing, but he is always there—as I am there for him.

And now there's Jack. Who maybe doesn't love me (yet or ever will), but who has taught me how to love. How to wait for it, how give the word its due weight, how to relish the process and enjoy the road. How to see myself through someone who appreciates me, both body and brain, who believes in my ability to rise. I meet this challenge, I grow toward the sun outside the darkest closet. I . . . photosynthesize.

There's an awful lot of talk these days about gratitude. We thank ourselves for coming to the yoga mat, we thank the Universe for the gifts we are about to receive. What I find myself flooded with today is a deep sense of precisely that. This past half year has been a spin cycle of trial and triumph, but I'd be blind if I didn't recognize the sheer force of love that's hit me in the face from the profoundest of places. My mother, my father, my friends. Peter Pan and family. The tango community at large. And Jack. I've been strong enough to pull my ass out of bed every day and make lemonade, to varying degrees of success, but all the same. I made it. And I did so floated by the hands of the aforementioned.

So say the old Lakota warriors: It is a good day to die. If the rug is pulled from under my feet tomorrow, next Thursday, next year, I will have spent my time here wisely. Trying, failing, learning, living, and indulging in a little too much sangria for the sake of love.

and here you come with a cup of tea

2011-02-12T10:13:00.005-05:00

I took a cold shower yesterday morning. First, the hot water took off, tail between legs, before I could so much as shampoo myself. Then I stayed, to shake the dreams of Jack I'd had.

You see, happy or unhappy, our self-sabotaging subconscious knows us better—knows when to suggest the man who sent you Seamus Heaney lines on Tuesday could forget you by Thursday. Three days is all it takes to undo all the good of your best harvest. And my hard-wired rejection-happy heart knows it.

My Jack is an academic. Now that the semester has started, he'll be off teaching and reverse commuting half the week, and I will be here. Without him. This is a good thing. Forced autonomy, a chance for me to install safeguards and shoulders on my emotional superhighway, a chance to reroute my GPS back to me. I've seen what happens otherwise.

The trouble with finding someone compatible is just that. The things which make you . . . you . . . also make you two. I cannot separate this man from tango, from yoga, from opera . . . and worse, from writing. So I make a point of dancing on my own, accepting nods from strange new leaders, trying to improve. I found the yoga class to end all yoga classes, where I go every Tuesday and Thursday (day full of poetry, day of forgetting) to sweat and stretch and (fuck blog-writing me for saying this) find myself.

And writing . . . oh, writing. My hail mary pass MFA applications in, I realize just how far I've come: from someone who did not write what was not posted here, to someone with a thirty page memoir excerpt and an embryonic sense of discipline. It's clear I've had a breakthrough. My sample morphed—in leaps and strides—with Jack et al's edits. Because of him, I turn out 1500 words a week to the philosophers pool for quality control (else I cough up twenty bucks).

If he were to break my heart tomorrow, would I come to associate the practice of writing with the presence of him? Probably.

So I add a few guard rails to my turnpikes and beltways around the metropolis of him. I signed up for a fiction class at Hunter (first, for the abovementioned fears, and second, because it scares me). I now owe 1500 words to the philosophers and five pages to Grace Edwards and her group of lawyers and novelist retirees.

Thursday was our first session. We met at an Upper East Side Catholic high school, in a fifth floor classroom. I trudged up all five flights, watching the city get shorter through the landing windows, and made my way past the Lilliputian lockers to room A, where ten shimmy-in chair desks were arranged in a circle.

This is a good thing for you, says Em, and she's not wrong. She's also not wrong that, had it not been for the G.I.Q. and His Royal Highness The Mogul, I may never have been so scared into staying healthy, keeping my escape car stalling on the emergency rails.

Still, I went two days without a word from him and I was rattled. I tried to remind myself of where he was and why I'm nuts and that, if I would only think back to Tuesday night, I would find imprinted in my memory a dear man removing his spectacles to hold me while I slept. Trouble is, I went to sleep . . . and all the doubts turned to demons, to vivid dreams of cruel rejection. I woke up with a motor-churning gut ache, mad at dream him and madder still at real-life me.

Even if my new writing workshop didn't feel like an AA meeting (minus the coffeecake and cigarettes), I would still have the feeling that my life since The Eighth Plague has become a constant exercise of self-improvement. An evolution project in progress. Some days I fall asleep triumphant, others, mornings like yesterday, I wake up in panic; I question whether I've accomplished anything at all—or ever will. My first quarter century, once a rich garden of masterpieces and beautiful mistakes, reduced to phrases like this: "Failed actress/always-waitress can't hack it as career girl . . . watch her as she drifts through life on odd jobs and ephemera until her teeth fall out and she dies, penniless and alone." This is where all my best laid ambitions crumble and I laugh from somewhere dark inside myself. These Jack dreams are the same: the cold, throaty chortle of my sinister cynical self.

In yoga, you hear a lot about the two selves: Self and self. What if my true Capital S self is too weak to bear the weight of my (fuck me again) dreams? What if I'm just a lazy, uninspired, uninspiring dilletante, a woman weak in constitution who really just wants to belong to someone, to be somebody's wife? Only I'm the sort of smart-enough person to know that, if I ever got there, it would only end in the inevitable sucker punch to the heart (because everybody knows marriage amounts to nothing but betrayal and eventual falling-out-of-love).

He wrote. Of course he wrote. And we spent the evening together listening to Nina Simone by candlelight, talking about the non-separateness of human beings. My pulse slowed to its favorite weekend pace. I crawled into bed after the ritual silencing of my cell phone and slept the sleep of kings.

If domestic contentment means more to me than most everything else, and that state is ultimately unachievable, what am I do to? Keep writing plotless messes riddled with extra adjectives, lazy prose abandoned for insomniac episodes of Ally McBeal in my dark twin bed, numbing myself to all experience to protect me from the one pattern I just can't break?

He's no Ted Hughes (and I no Sylvia Plath).

irony: not just for hipsters

2011-02-02T17:14:00.003-05:00

Strolling through Bushwick hand in hand, after Saturday afternoon vinyasa death class, I realized why the intersection between Jack's loft and the yoga studio always feels so familiar.

Remember that douchebag Vegan realtor that took me apartment hunting in Bushwick?

Yeah well, I just realized that (had I been able to fit a twin bed in the room and still closed the door) I almost lived two blocks from Jack's apartment. In a never-been-renovated railroad apartment above a framing store. Across from a Getty gas and a few industrial warehouse loading zones.

Also: Tuesday nights after tango class we've been eating our brought-from-home sandwich dinners over paper cups of tea at a deli on 7th Avenue. One never notices the names of these places, but—just in case you were curious—this particular one is called The New Start Deli.

Hmm.

città d'amore

2011-01-27T15:53:00.006-05:00

January is a slow month for tango.

Maybe it's the seven varieties of frozen precipitation, or perhaps merely the post-holiday backlash blues and a general lack of funds . . .

Either way, I've danced a great deal less since new year. Unless you count the kind of dancing one does to Caravelli (in woolen socks on kitchen floors in Bushwick lofts, a pot of tea or else a skillet full of frugal food abubble on the stove). I say why not.

My mornings have come to smell of gasoline and truck exhaust, or else of deep fried duck, as now I pass the Peking Food Corporation and an auto salvage yard on my commute. My walk to the L is bright, white snow piled against stark, square buildings. It smells cold and the light almost blinds me under this black wool hat I've come to wear as much for Jack as for the warmth (because I like the way he moves it from my eyes).

I reiterate, at the risk of angering the Fates: I have never once been happier than this.

I work mornings, dish and dusting duties eased by NPR. I do yoga. I eat damn near the same Whole Foods salad every day for lunch (with bowl rebate, just under three dollars). I spend the rest of my day writing, with or without Jack, drifting from tea to steaming mug of tea. Evenings I dance. Or else the Ginsberg Group convinces us to join them for a film, projected on the big, white walls in their cold, white common space, sipping real good whiskey from a coffee cup.

We sleep braided together as if the bomb might drop, or the bed might plummet down the chute to the river Styx. His is a nightstand built of books. He talks me through his theories, he reads my drafts. I've worn the same pair of socks for six straight days.

Funny how easily we change. Nothing fundamental lost, just this new geography, the new routine. How soon Miss Lonely Hearts gets used to hearing 'we' without a flinch.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a barrel full of doubts. This mutually supportive, monogamous thing I've found myself in, with its two-way superhighway of communication—it scares me. But these slow dance moments, this tender—genuine tenderness—has me lit up like a hothouse lily.

New love is a gamble anywhere. It is impossible in New York City. The scenes of your reverie will turn to landmines after the fact, the city a treacherous field of pain for you to navigate alone. But what kind of romantics would we be without the leap? We do not care that certain delis, certain subway platforms, certain bits of park will be off limits when this thing ends in tears.

You might imagine I feel invincible. I'm sorry, I do not. And I do not mean to brag.

If anything, new love is like a terminal disease. But you accept your diagnosis and run naked from the office, ready to lick life from the gutters if you must. It only lasts as long as you let it flap around you like a flock of birds.

just in case the latest platitudes are true

2011-01-14T17:21:00.006-05:00

New Yorkers are busy people, acclimated to the fiendish pace set by a zealously over-competent service industry. In no other city in these United States can you order a sandwich and already be holding up the line by the time you find your wallet. In bodegas, in coffee bars, there is an infrastructure to maximize efficiency; things happen fast. We are therefore soft on waiting.

Cue the inevitable anomaly: a tortoise-paced barista pacing from pastry case to cash box with all the expediency of a low level bureaucrat on lunch hour. The sighs behind me are audible.

Jesus fucking Christ. (Always the first comment overheard.) You try to ignore, hold your weight evenly between your two feet, balance your heavy donkey’s load of laptop, purse, and Whole Foods lunch, have patience with the questions in your heart and remember this is the only Friday, January 14^th, Two-Oh-One-One we're ever gonna get. You watch this creature lumber back and forth and begin to fantasize about your own till proficiency, your bygone bartending wonder days. This is amusing for approximately seven minutes and then, just as your own impatience is about to pop, the dampening hulk of a man behind you mutters more—

Wow, lady, you are fucking slow.

(beat)

Seriously!?

(beat)

Slow slow slow slow... fuck me. Wow.

I mean, he's right and all, but somehow the ugliness of his short fuse builds an almost beatific buffer between you and all the douchebags of the world. You start to think perhaps there's not a fire to run to after all. And, by the time your turn comes at the counter, you are able just to smile, order your latte, and say thank you very much.

That got me thinking. Breathe in, breathe out. Have a little patience, have a little faith.

My dad has been . . . unenthusiastic? About Jack? Mostly I think just to keep me from spinning off the road in eagerness to celebrate my relative domestic contentment. Meg, he said, you were just so desperate to have a boyfriend. And that might be true. But not as it applies to Jack.

You see, had I just inhaled and exhaled my way through the wilderness back last December then this July, perhaps I could have avoided the belly flop I took trying to get Gatz and the G.I.Q. to give two shits to rub together.

If I'm learning anything new these days, as a new woman and a New Yorker, trying to walk mindfully in this city of quick and dirty sin, it is perhaps that good things come to those who wait.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better nip off and embroider that on a couch cushion somewhere.

the internet gaping before the great awake

2011-01-11T00:28:00.005-05:00

I have become afraid of sleep.

It is the darndest thing: to stomp through my routine each night by rote—teeth, hair, toilette, leave daily socks on under pajamas, cocoon myself beneath flannel sheets and folded quilts. And here I am stalling, half midnight.

I am tired, running another fever, leaking from the nose. It was only Sunday I was quoting Sylvia Plath to Jack in bed. I am too pure for you or anyone.

Fact is, I'm not.

I'm not afraid of all that much anymore, be it death or pain or yet another broken heart. I like myself on the yoga mat, the dance floor, the far side of Saturday night. But something happens in the bower that makes the doubt start beating in my heart, flapping its ugly wings, turning itches into ailments. These moments I feel I am a cheat, that the big-winged birds are coming to collect.

If when I shut my eyes alone, I lose my grip, why should I sleep?

so this is the new year

2011-01-03T01:58:00.006-05:00

The grateful train is leaving the station. Thank you, powers that be, for the following:

Bushwick rooftop midnight.

Champagne, fireworks, cold weather kiss.

Sweaters, topcoats, made of wool.

Funk music dance off.

Tête á tête with airplane scone.

Couch cushion movie theatre, single malt Scotch.

Early evening nap, macaroni and cheese.

Peeled grapefruit sections, avocado on toast.

Earl Grey with milk.

A day spent asleep.

Oh . . . and thanks for Jack. Being held by him is like lying in an airfield at the close of dusk, the world a quiet, windy blue. An eerie silent sound prevails, ocean to eardrum. Dim streetlamps in the distance twinkle in the darkness. Safely falling into unknown space.

inimitable anxiety disorder and all

2010-12-31T16:59:00.005-05:00

Twenty Ten draws to a close like a roller coaster car, hitting the skids after the final drop. Soon the gates will open and we will jerk by fits and stops back to the platform. The turnstiles will snap wide and we'll exit the ride, keeping our belongings in sight and checking our pockets for just how much change we've lost.

This week—what with the blizzard and these infernal balls in the air—I've mostly been trying to confine myself to my god given boundaries of skin and bone. Notable exception: yesterday evening, when I cried for approximately an hour then threw up an entire bag of movie theatre Skittles.

But I made it. I am coasting through the twilight into Twenty Eleven. I spent a good five minutes in savasana today, taking deep ass breaths in a room full of sweat and rubber mat smell, and so have managed to loop a few new years meditations through my tortuous psyche. God grant me the serenity, etc., etc.. I am listening to gentle things of genius, played on nylon strings or steel. I am preparing my heart for opening up and staying there. Because that is my resolution this year. To shuck the oysters of my doubt and find the pearls. To silence my one woman critical chorus of 'no'. To look before I leap, then leap the further, fall the farther, and reap the fruits of my nascent courage.

I will continue to pursue joy, joy, and abject joy, even if that means I spend my entire twenty-eighth year living in this sublet and cleaning someone else's toilets. I will stretch and dance and write and see the world, one day at a time. I will listen. Because live is a an action verb. I will no longer expect "to be" "to do" and "to love" to happen to me without my first cobbling their path.

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may

not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love.

Even now, poisoned from stem to stern by my own self-destructive spin cycle, I will take a shower, shave my legs, and trot off into the bowels of my city in search of my true love.

Maybe it will be Jack, maybe not. But I will not turn up at his door tonight like a deer in headlights. I will convert these barbed wire landslides into butterflies, and radiate that little princess part of me that really just longs to see him, to wrap my arms around his cherry red jumper, smell the wool, and hold him fast.

This too shall pass. Tomorrow will dawn one way or another. He will be there or he won't. It will be a new year, another swipe at the canvas. And the snowdrift in front of my apartment will melt, maybe not tomorrow, but next week surely, and with it will disappear the purple arc of Skittle puke, evidence of the worst of me.

So cheers. To auld lang syne . . . and second chances.

on karma

2010-12-29T00:37:00.007-05:00

Remember the four-day date? Friday, December 19th, 6:19 pm to 7:18 pm, en route to the opera, I was stuck underground, lodged between Spring and Canal on the C train, already late for my Moonstruck fountain moment with Jack?

That unsung hour, so easily obscured by the flashboom romance that ensued, was really a microcosm of a Meg Ryan movie in which I, the heroine, joined a chorus of kvetching commuters stranded on the subway.

It went a little like this: I was sitting by the door, my big-girl heels crossed at the ankles, my Kindle in my lap. I was listening to pre-game opera on my iPod and perusing the New York Times, paying but peripheral attention to the bitching and moaning and "Come on, man" banter that is customary with gratuitous transit delays, and wincing with every stationary minute.

Eventually, I cracked, breaking the fourth wall of my anonymity to bond with my fellow New Yorkers. We all do it. In these moments the whole city is your family.

Tell me about it. I have opera tickets.

More back-and-forth. The lady at my left was hosting a birthday party in the Village, at one of those snooty bistros that don't seat incomplete parties (and don't hold tables more than fifteen minutes). The lady in front of me had left work early to get some Christmas shopping done—so much for that idea. Another was on her way to meet a friend.

You're going to the opera?

If I ever make it, I answered. The story followed. It's my first real date with this guy I'm sort of crazy about . . . and I'm supposed to meet him at the Met, by the fountain, five minutes ago . . . and he doesn't have a phone.

You would have thought I'd exposed a ring of seal-clubbing puppy-skinning crime lords. These women, with their own places to go and people to meet, were aghast. If they could have formed a human chain to crowd-surf me up the island to Lincoln Center, they would have done so immediately.

Instead, they all held their impotent cell phones in the air to search for signal. They brainstormed. They demanded to know what kind of adult male doesn't have a cellular device.

A fourth woman chimed in. I live up there. When they open the doors, we'll split a cab. We'll get you there!

Only, they (the MTA) didn't open the doors. Oblivious to our plotting, an unruly cluster of men at the front of the car had begun to heave their bulk at the door, to force it open. Two minutes later, we were free, carried along in a human torrent up and to the street. My cabmate and I darted from corner to corner until we found a cab. We cajoled our driver to brave the West Side Highway, then Bridget, new-found wingwoman extraordinaire, spent the next nine minutes calling every business she could think of abutting Lincoln Square.

Lululemon: So I have a crazy request. My friend and I—she looked over to me and winked—were just stuck on a train WITH POLICE ACTIVITY for almost an hour and she was supposed to meet her date by the fountain at seven. Can you send someone over to tell him she is on her way?

Starbucks: No, I understand that your customers come first, but this is their FIRST DATE and she was stuck underground.

Rosa Mexicano: Surely someone can just pop over and help her out? I mean . . . the subway stopped because of POLICE ACTIVITY.

Of course no one would help. It was the height of the pre-theatre rush and this is New York City, not Brigadoon, but I had to admire her temerity, her utter willingness to troubleshoot.

We pulled up behind the sky lawn at about 7:32. I tried to hand her cash, but she wouldn't have it. She nearly pushed me from the cab.

No no, my treat. You just go get your man! And, with that, she thrust her card into my hand and demanded only that I tell her how it went.

Tonight, as a positive affirmation, I sent the email. Because, really, it was an absolute success. I made it and the date was grand. If nothing else, I have that victory. And so should she.

the girl who cried wolf, part two

2010-12-25T01:26:00.006-05:00

I tell stories about my Scotsman, his accent ringing in my ears with the Christmas bells, his gentle eyes, his turns of phrase. Tender moments remembered from the dead of night, every little trick of eye that makes him new to me, distinguished among the other tango cads.

No one believes me.

You have all been patient . . . through Gatsby and the G.I.Q. You've followed my roller coasters from their crest to the inevitable crash. I understand. I have no better reason to believe.

Except that it is Christmas, and I am full of wine and hope and buttered breads. The New York moon hides behind the blizzard blowing in. I hide behind a dream. The quiet of this dead-leg week invites my introspection, this taking stock.

Do I not have all I'd ever ask for?

I fear what may be missing is the faith.

My Scotsman's homebound flight (on Tuesday) was canceled and set again (for Thursday). Wednesday was our stolen evening, his loft to ourselves with candles lit, Prosecco from a goblet, warmed up farmers' market apple pie. We sat on the sofa, our legs intertwined, and talked about feminism, his work, my writing, and the finer points of normative naturalism. We slow-danced to Miles Davis and stayed up til dawn.

I'll see you in a week, you wonderful creature, you, he said when he left. He kissed me as I stood on goosefleshed tippy toes, my naked legs stretched up into his candy red jumper. He was humming, scatting, bah-rum-bum-bum-ing in his delicious baritone, happy as a king.

Later, locking up and stabbing out for work, I was smiling too. Industrial Bushwick glittered in the morning sun. This man, my Jack, is smart and kind. He has treated me as a long lost Maggie Cassidy, reincarnate for a second chance.

I have no reason to doubt him, but I do.

Then again, I doubt everything. It is a matter of history. Or insanity: doing and feeling the same things over and over, expecting different results.

How long before the well of trust is dry, before we die inside? Are we born with a finite supply of wonder and the will to dream? I realized, this year, I forgot to lay out homemade cookies and a carrot stick. I had them squirreled in my suitcase in a plastic bag, but the hotel city Christmas Eve threw my bearings, and I let one more childhood moment go.

Love is like believing in Santa Claus. It is just as implausible, and therefore just as important to leave the cookies and listen for sleigh bells.

For now, he is an ocean away. I have no guarantees. But Friday will come to welcome in the newer year, his flight will land, and we'll have to wait and see.

Kerouac wrote, "It's only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love."

May later come sooner than it might.

new york bohemian underground presents: the four day date

2010-12-19T12:51:00.010-05:00

Friday.

3 pm: My first proper date with the philosopher. Simon Rattle's debut at the Met: Pelleas et Mellisande at eight. I am to meet him at seven by the fountain, for an aperitif. I think, I am Cher.

6:04 pm: On the F train to Manhattan, in wool tights and big girl heels, I listen to Christmas Adagios.

6:16 pm: Transfering to the C, I check my eye makeup. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

6:19 pm: A screech, the train lurches, we stop.

6:47pm: Nosed two doors deep into the Spring Street station, the natives grow restless, shifting weight from foot to foot and sighing at their watches, their cell phones.

6:58 pm: Still stalled, I make a friend. We'll split a cab uptown if ever we are freed. I think of my date, there by the fountain, phoneless in the cold.

7:18 pm: A horde of rambunctious men at the front of our car busts open the subway door. We funnel out like rats, the rest behind us in the tube.

7:23 pm: I cajole the glass-half-empty cab driver: suck it up and get me to Lincoln Center. He seems to respond to the words, "big tip." It takes us five minutes to make it to Houston, but then he, reluctant, speeds up the West Side Highway in a godsent traffic reprieve.

7:32 pm: I run across the plaza, scarf trailing, fling myself into the arms of a tall and red-scarved Scotsman, who takes nothing but delight in my story and buys me Malbec.

8 pm: Curtain. We are lost in Debussy, in each other. In the crystal chandeliers at intermission.

10:16 pm: Second intermission. We share the sandwiches he has brought, gaze at women in elaborate hats.

12 am: Midnight wine and chat. He twiddles my Claddagh in his hand. I look down as he rights it, my heart no longer open to the village boys.

2:09 am: Last-called and thwarted by trains, adventures on the L to Bushwick.

4:10 am: Two cups of chamomile, kissing in the kitchen, and the flipping through of books.

4:13 am: A herd of roommates descends, across the threshold in a cloud of smoke, bearing bulging grocery bags and buoyant conversation. Cheap beer and the chopping of onions ensues. They've heard so much about me.

5:00 am: Impromptu dinner party, pasta puttanesca, the window glowing Maxfield Parrish blue. My philosopher is Jack, his roommate chef a Ginsberg if ever one I've met.

7:15 am: Bundled up in borrowed jumpers on the roof, his arms around my waist. We watch the sunrise turn the skyline salmon pink.

Saturday.

12:3o pm: Assembled company convenes for cucumber and cheese on bread, we squeeze six into one SUV and drive. The sun sparkles white on the world, and cold.

1:41 pm: Silent film screenings.

2:57 pm: Robert Rauschenberg at Gagosian, we stroll through Chelsea arm in arm.

4:30 pm: Back in Brooklyn, a wee snooze. He rubs my feet, I butcher Neruda en español.

1:15 am: No hot water, I commute to shower and dress again for dancing. The elevator opens at Nocturne, the world is warmer. A wink.

3:17 am: We dance the final four, his lips a benediction on my brow.

Sunday.

4:08 pm: Afternoon tango practice. He welcomes me with tea.

7:30 pm: Flea markets on forgotten avenues, a boxed feast from Whole Foods salad bar, the comparing of family Christmases.

9:26 pm: Barstool of a tapas bar, coffee and the crossword, his arm around my back, his forehead to my cheek.

10:30 pm: More dancing. More winks across the room.

12:38 pm: Fancy a hot shower? he says.

1:37 am: Alan's solo venture bolognese bubbling on the stove. A bottle of Korbel, a talk about art.

3:36 am: I set an alarm for never, Pushkin stories by my Scottish furnace.

Monday.

9:30 pm: A wee whiskey before the Black Swan, with Alan and his date.

10:37 pm: His hand on my knee the whole way through.

1 am: Mulled wine at a bluegrass bar. Status of the moon: still mostly white.

2:12 am: Apres gin and tater tots, the moon has gone half dark. We retrace our steps down the windy road.

3:45 am: The moon turns red. Hot apple cider, a bonfire in a garden bar, lanterns twinkling under stars.

6:30 am: We sleep, we smell of woodsmoke, that is all.

analog barbie, part one

2010-12-15T17:32:00.003-05:00

Eleven months and a half months ago, Peter Pan gave me a Kindle. A device I feared and loathed and have only recently come to accept as a suitable conduit for the written word.

I am still wary. It sits before me in its black leather case, looking smug—and so . . . digital.

Flip side: it carries within the power of the pdf. It can bring me The New Yorker and the New York Times on the subway, so that I may stand a snowball's chance of reading either periodical between dances—and quarter life crises.

I tell myself: no real books. Proper literature must be held between the hands, the pages felt beneath the fingers as we lose ourselves in turning them. There must be one thing left sacred. Then again, is it only a matter of time? Methinks I doth protest in vain. I have skied up the hill of my own stubbornness to find my foothold slipping.

I mean, come on people. I blog (though I shudder at the verb). I spend untold hours sifting through detritus on Facebook when I ought to be nose deep in Faulker. I've even sunk so low as to tweet (again, with the shudder).

Is it the turtle shell convenience of it all? If I thought for a moment the purity of the device's intention was to lighten the bookbag load, I might more easily forgive myself, but the intention was to sell ice trays to Eskimos . . .

By which I mean: Thank you, Peter, for this new frontier.

because Santa inquired

2010-12-11T12:49:00.012-05:00

My blessings being innumerable this year, I have a hard time assembling a wish list. My standard everyday desire for a boyfriend and a dog notwithstanding, I want all the usual things for Christmas: world peace, twinkle lights and peppermint hot chocolate.

This list is for everyone but my mama (who has already spoiled me rotten with mother/daughter spa services and a shocking quantity of other lovely gifts) who would insist on wrapping something for me this Christmas and needs a little inspiration. By no means do I expect anything from this list. The items included are merely suggestions. This means you.

- Funky earrings or other treasures from the Union Square holiday market.
- Flannel pajamas. (Exhibits A [cream/dog, size S] and B)
- A brown leather bookbag. The closer it resembles something out of Anne of Green Gables, the better. (You know, something you throw in the basket of your bicycle as you peddle along the seashore in autumn of 1890?) But if that is too complicated, I also like this one.
- An Irish cable knit sweater in one of those great colours like "oatmeal" or "white with natural fleck." (Exhibits A.)
- Tango shoes to replace the ones I have worn to shreds, from my friend's import boutique. (Exhibits A or B, in tan or brown satin, size 40.5, 3" heel)
- A copper heart necklace, made by my college friend Lilian Crowe.
- Music, namely good classical, opera or jazz. Or, you know, Red Letter Year, by Ani DiFranco.
- Gift certificates in any denomination to Anthropologie, American Apparel or Barnes & Noble.
- Books (any and all), but especially those pertaining to early U.S. presidents (such as The Adams Jefferson Letters and My Dearest Friend , Letters of Abigail and John Adams), anything translated from the original Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and anything by Louise DeSalvo.

Some of these things are awfully extravagant, so I will stress that really, I am always happy with books or the funds with which to purchase them (and sweaters . . . and socks . . . and things made of dark chocolate . . . and the color grey.)

Clothing: top: XS or S, bottom: 4, dress: 4. Unmentionables: panties: M, bra: 36A. Shoes: 10.5.

But this season is not about presents or purchases. It is about holiday cookies and/or cocktails in the company of those you love. So if you find yourself a little lean on cash, I would warmly accept nothing more than your well wishes for my grad school applications and my upcoming hadj to Buenos Aires (coming spring/summer 2011).

If you are charitably inclined, give a little to a good cause (such as Charity:Water or Kids For Tomorrow) in my name.

Wishing you all love and light at the close of Twenty Ten.

the girl who cried wolf

2010-12-09T01:10:00.009-05:00

Or: how, drinking my dinner, I came to a deeper understanding of tango through chicken sexing.

Boy . . . Girl . . . Boy . . . Girl . . .

B went on in his brogue to detail the phenomenology of gallus gallus domesticus sex determination, how the untrained, unscientific eye can, after a period of seeing a visual put to purported fact, just tell.

I suppose I started it when I said tango was an impossible conversation between man and woman, a six minute moment strung between two human posts, crystalline, glossy, but false. For leaders, I said, it is chess. For followers, meditation. You see what we close our eyes to. You stare, you steer, you peacock, and we are free in flight. But then I took the mallet to the chisel when I said, our objectives being disparate, the moment itself is never wholly shared.

That's when he brought up the chickens. As if to say, sure, but see . . . we are not always navigating. The shared moment can only happen with both parties present. Which means the leader must reach a place in the dance where his lead will bypass his navigational brain and he moves from inside the music. When he is no longer being told boy, girl, boy, girl, but sees a conveyor belt of chicks and just knows which is which—without knowing why. That is the moment you feel, he said.

B is a dreamboat I dared not entertain. Tall, broad chested, blue eyed boy with a lucid wit and a lovely embrace. We've sent a few pithy emails, whiled away the odd tanda or two in impromptu chat and practiced once on a Saturday morning. It is all I can do in class not to blush with his bicep beneath my palm, my eyes turn to his chest, a loveworn swatch of grey green sweater, as we dance. Then on Tuesday, with all the nonchalance in the world, he tucked his arm around my grey wool coat and steered me through frigid midtown west to the nearest pub.

Going Guinness for Guinness, it was established that I: had a rocky childhood, wear a Claddagh, enjoy whiskey and believe in God.

You do? You mean, an omnipotent paternal presence-in-the-sky, creator-of-the-Universe, judger-of-our-every-action kind of deity?

No, of course not.

Well good, that's good.

We talked about astrophysics, art and the intersection there between. We covered theism, theatre, Nietzsche, the question of monogamy and the creation of the state. Somewhere in there we talked about Dionysus—and Apollo—the finer dynamics of the lead-follow relationship, the psychics versus the scientists and how it's all the same.

And that. That is what I believe in, I said. Sharing atoms. If you and I sit here long enough, we will eventually become each other.

It takes a rare breed of man to have patience with me when I wax quixotic, and a rarer one still to suggest a walk through the cold to a deserted hotel bar for ice tinkling Negronis and another round of laughs.

You mean to say the man/woman moment of transcendence we seek in tango is nothing more than the mutual sexing of chickens?

Precisely, he said. An epiphany.

It was a fierce rout of intellectual foreplay. I am still reeling in the brain chakra, not to mention select others, far more dazzling.

At three, the lobby bar closed around us, the Ecuadorian Italian barman shooing us out with a wink and his best wishes. We traversed the marble to the glass doors and into the wall of frozen wind. He had his arm around me again, but I swear it was of necessity. It was bitter cold.

I had one hand clutching the side of his coat, the other shoved between breast buttons. He flung one arm round my shoulders and the other around my waist, walking almost sideways. We stopped for a light and he leaned down to my face as I leaned up. Behind glasses, his blue eyes twinkled with the icy air, the traffic lit intersection. My hat slipped over my eyebrows, obscuring all but my nose. He righted it, smoothed the black knit backwards off my face. The light was still red . . . and then—

I have become a girl who dares not hope, a consummate assumer of the worst. Therefore, this evening, for all its merit, must stand alone, regardless of the way he brushed my hair from my face with both his hands and said, as if laughing, I've been wanting to do this for ages. Dunno why. Just this."

I realize also that I said—and just last week—there must be something more to all this courtship and coupling. If nothing comes of this (and round these parts, we fear the worst), at least I know. This is what was missing.

Thank you, Universe, for my philosopher.

andare via

2010-12-06T02:11:00.007-05:00

Are you playing? he asked.

He had pulled me aside at the milonga to do this, dragged his folding chair to meet mine, trapped me between his lanky knees.

Funny how the simplest phrases are the most easily misunderstood in translation. Or the most easily evaded.

Playing?

I think I know what he's talking about, but the question exhausts me. How am I supposed to know what I am doing? I met him at an Irish pub last night near Grand Central, for burgers and Cokes (he doesn't drink) and we sprang through the cold to listen to music on his computer (must be a generational thing) at his hotel.

Now, hotel rooms typically bring me joy, a comfort I can't quite understand. It was all I could do not to kick my boots off and flop down on one of the two double beds, enjoying the midtown office diorama through the plate glass window. But something told me to be uneasy, even with this bookish and slight specimen from Livorno who sent me roses on my birthday.

He kissed me. And it was nice, and to be expected. But then Italian men have this charmingly lax concept of time everywhere but in the bedroom. Late to everything, but the absolute first to try and peel off the turtleneck, reach for the jeans button, all the while whispering how much they want to fare l'amore con te. And I'm no prude, but this was all moving a little too fast.

Maybe it's the new nun-like digs—the twin-sized bed, the plaid flannel sheets, the room eight by ten. Maybe it's the vows I've almost taken not to own anything or love anybody ever again. Maybe it's the man, the men, I've not quite mourned.

Maybe it's me, wanting to carry my heart like the covenant and let it fester into mystical ether that melts the faces of the infidels. I just want to wait. It has been so long since I have been seduced, properly seduced, but I remember the attendant ceremony. As in: there ought to be one.

Roses, while lovely, words, while pretty, are no substitutes for knowing it is time for your clothes to slip to the floor, when your mind and your body are in easy lockstep, racing forward into the trains colliding overhead, and it is all you can do to keep up to the tune of so many trumpets. There's a great deal of wooing and winning to be done before this may be effortless.

Hai paura? he asked. Are you scared?

Yes, I am scared.

Also my heart is tired. Also, I say to myself, you are not yet worthy.

It is okay, we have time, he says, because they know what to say to get what they want. Va bene. We can just lay here, fully clothed, our thin, girlish frames, me conscious of my boots on the white duvet.

I fall asleep. Or he does. It is comfortable. He holds me in a practiced way (they must teach Italian schoolboys to do this), one arm squeezing, the other cupping the back of my hair like a child. It is the way a predator lulls you to safety only to suck your organs through your punctured skin. And it feels nice.

Everything feels nice—the eye contact, the furtive handholding racing through intersections, and this: being in someone's arms, even when I shut my eyes and imagine those arms to be the fleshier arms of others. Even when I shut my eyes and imagine dancing with someone else. My eyes flap open in the dark and I wonder, am I only here because I like to feel?

Either way, this is not fair to him. I am undecided here, and I have to go.

Devo andare, I say. I interrupt his snore.

Ma non... dormi qui con me. Dormi qui, piccola.

But I did leave. I read myself home on the F train, picked up a pint of sorbet to soothe my newly aching throat, went to my cell and to sleep.

And tonight he asks if I am playing with him. He wrestles the colloquial and I could hedge some more, but he deserves a straight answer.

I just need to be very careful. I always dive. This time I have to wade. You understand?

He pretends to, but then it's all . . . If I return next week, I come for you . . . and: I just need to know, when I see in your eyes, what I see there, are you lying?

My eyes never lie. But that is a stupid thing to say. And what do men see there that some find so captivating and the others fury-making. The innocence, the stores of love, the deer caught in headlights. The caution crusting over the abandon. Short answer: how should I know.

Can you come with me now?

I look at him sharply as if he has asked for me to kill someone, he sees my panic, understands, and leaves. It is the gentlemanly thing to do. Okay, we go this way, bit by bit. Write to me.

Yes, I say, and he is gone. I've got the whole milonga speculating about playboy flyboy and me. Are we or aren't we? Aren't, I'm embarrassed to admit. Or relieved.

I'm in a cluster of girls telling stories. Keep different men for different things, they say, diversify.

Then Gatsby is there at the edge of the dance floor, winking. And though I've sworn him off, it's been so long since we danced that I nod and make my way to take his hand.

He has a heart shaped sweat stain on his shirt.

now available on twitter

2010-12-05T04:17:00.004-05:00

www.twitter.com/gtothefox #ohlordwhathasbecomeofme

from queens to kings

2010-12-04T00:02:00.004-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, A Room of One's Own. One twin bed, one electrical outlet, one metal bar on which to hang my hat. Above a stationer and an Italian espresso bar. On a street strung with holiday lights.

My indoctrination occurred last night, over the seemingly inconsequential purchase of a knit hat to keep my ears warm in the legitimate cold of an icy Thursday night in December. Year of our lord 2010.

Hipster Clerk: What's your zip?

Moi: 11215?

Hipster Clerk: (rapid change in demeanor to express sudden and absolute solidarity) Brooklyn. I also live in Brooklyn. You have a nice night.

Moi: Well shit, you too.

And just like that, I belong. I didn't even judge him for the obviously non-prescription strength of his thick frame glasses. Or his jaunty cap. Or his angel hair jeans.

I have made my peace with Brooklyn. Watch out, bitches. I'm one of you now.

odd year, this time twenty seven

2010-11-27T12:09:00.005-05:00

The day after Thanksgiving is often a lost one—Black Friday, a cold and cloudy day, not quite winter, not quite Christmas. The morning after.

But this year it was also my birthday, and it was one of the best.

As if Thanksgiving were not party enough (I am continually humbled by the generosity with which the Family Pan opens their doors and hearts and lives to me—year in and year out), I had a birthday to celebrate. One year closer to Spinsterdom and Cat Haggery.

So I rang it in right: went to yoga class, took myself to lunch, and had my first Peppermint Mocha of the season. I bought myself a brand new dress and a big chocolate cake and walked through the Village in the grey gloaming, enjoying the desolate peace of the city on a holiday weekend and how it smelled faintly of woodsmoke.

Then I got showered with love and spoiled rotten by just about everyone in my life. Little gifts and large gifts (all perfect) and then sixteen people at a big wooden table eating ravioli and drinking Chianti by the jug.

Then the milonga, where we ate the aforementioned cake and I was greeted by two dozen red, red roses, sent by Spumoni from five thousand miles away.

I was a little too tipsy to dance, but it was good to end the evening under the twinkle lights in the back basement Ukrainian den of iniquity all the same, surrounded by friends I would never have made were it not for my shameless addiction to Argentine tango.

If this year is any reflection on its inaugural day, I will spend it smiling, behind a veritable Great Wall of Gratitude, tickled pink by the people in my life, with full knowledge of my impossibly good luck in those things that truly matter.

So from the bones of twenty six, I make a stock. It is a scrappy broth, given my circumstances, made from bits and blobs in a rented room. And it is just what I need. So I live out of a suitcase (well, two suitcases now, if we're counting) . . . I could not be more blessed than I feel today.

happy thanksgiving

2010-11-25T11:25:00.000-05:00

To everyone in my life who has been a rockstar in this time of flux, to my family and friends for putting up with my transience, to the fellas who've given me such beautiful dances, to the ladies for the solidarity, and to everyone who has made me feel a little less alone, I couldn't exist without you right now and I am truly grateful for you all.

to make a very long story short

2010-11-22T02:01:00.004-05:00

I ended things with Gatsby. Me. I did it.

I sat there in his car, after an hour of intense eye contact over injera and honey wine, and listened to yet another "I'm just not sure I can shoulder the responsibility of a relationship right now" speech.

(as visions of G.I.Q. danced in my head)

Responsibility. To answer for oneself. Golly gosh by goodness, what a burden, I thought.

You know, I'm tired, I said. I deserve someone who can be sure about me, without audition or condition. So we should just be friends.

Maybe it was reverse psychology. Advanced Maneuvers for the Captain of Industry 101: Getting Her to Let You Go. Or maybe it was merely my nascent backbone, tuned like a radio antennae to the wisest counsel of my patient, patient friends.

Either way, I have been dancing the sadness out through my tired legs, hour after midnight hour. Keeping open the tiny birdhouse in my heart for the someday love of someone worth loving.

postgraduate postmodern poster child

2010-11-13T23:37:00.005-05:00

As I stare down mile marker 27 on the road to Dirty Thirty, I have only this to say: Eat my dust.

I flipped the match and I still don't regret it.

Recipe for Disappearance: Sublet, suitcase, eleven hour workdays.

I used to love the moment of crawling under the comforter, preparing for sleep, running my toes along the bottom sheet, letting my body sink into soft relief from all this New York City hardness. These days, I sleep for survival. I take the bed like a tight end with the ball tucked under the elbow crook—face first in one forward assault. I sleep as fast as I can.

I am up with the birds and down with the underdogs.

Dessert: Writing sample, tango habit, yoga, boys. (In order of percentage of overall weight.)

My priorities have shifted their shit around. Two full time jobs stretch me thin from dawn until dawn, and my daily strategy is not to win the war, but to take the scrimmages one by one. Example, on Wednesday I got up at 6:30 to make an am yoga class. I listened to The Podcast while I mopped the kitchen and vacuumed the rugs. I did GRE problem sets on the PATH train to Newark.

I can very nearly eat standing up. (Translation: I am cheating death!)

I sublet in a seedy section of the Heights, living out of my suitcase. I can project neither of my two (now full-time) jobs more than a few months into the future, but I've made rent and COBRA this month and maybe, just maybe, there'll be a little something left over with which to buy Christmas gifts.

As tango now requires a rather expensive cab fare home, I spent two—count em, two—evenings (read: between the dinner hour of 10pm and the crash pad hour of 2) this week on the couch in my sweatpants, hard at work. I have a draft, albeit an imperfect one, to show for this.

Everything is a big fat mess, but for the first time in my life I feel confident making choices of myself, by myself, and for myself. I'm learning what it feels like to be in control, to change those things I can.

I've run my resume through the paper shredder. It now would seem to represent a circus performer with acrophobia and Tourette's. My internal marketing department has all but thrown up their hands and quit, the remnants of their catered lunch left on the conference table.

With every week, I look less and less like what I thought a grown up ought to be. I am like the Mets with the first quarter of the season behind them. The spectators are getting nervous. In other words: a nose dive. Or maybe a swan dive, if I can arch my arms out in time. Or—best yet—om sūryāya namaḥ, sun salutation style.

That said, quite simply, I've lost the desire to explain myself.

I may have disappeared, but I am not unhappy. I'm moving forward, up or down. I walk fast and keep the landing gear in tight. This is efficiency living and maybe I'm not happy, but also maybe I've never been happier.

My mother misunderstands and says I ought to show a little gratitude to the Universe for not letting me fall flat on my ass (as perhaps I should have done). But perhaps I have not adequately expressed the victories among all this adversity.

My friends are good ones. My family loves me. My therapist approves of me. My high school English teacher thinks I'm still worth his time. I'm rocking one towel, three socks, two pairs of jeans, my fleece jacket playing Chicken with the onslaught of winter. People matter so much more than things. I'm healthy enough to function on five hours of sleep and I know where I want to go. The same Universe that sent the plague of locusts also blew up my crash balloon. When I cut out the noise, my blessings were that much easier to count.

It is about purpose.

What good are all the jobs, all the money in the world without conviction? I'm not getting any younger. I have no wheels but this self-same junker I've been driving around for 26 years. Time to dust it off and tune it up for the next hundred thousand miles. I am approaching the point of no return and I plan to run naked through the sprinklers on the neighbors' lawn until the dicta of polite society can come up with something better than, "What about a 401k?"

Last night I danced until three, ate apple crumble with friends until four, then walked up Park Avenue to Grand Central with the hazel-eyed man who makes me remember Italian verb conjugations and says, "Sei bellissima, lo sai?"

It was nice, but it wasn't a disaster. I thank you, Universe, for that. For the lovely moment with Spumoni, sure, but mostly for leaving the pit of my stomach just exactly where it was. For letting me wake up without finding empty spaces to be filled.

Tonight I've chained myself to a desk in a nocturnal Newark industrial park, writing and eating cheddar cheese and Macintosh apples while Gatsby toils away at Big Business on the other end of the office. It may not be the most dignified way to spend a Saturday night, but the tranquil hum of the trucking lanes outside, the heating vents inside, and the clack of my own keystrokes under fluorescent light is just fine by me. I'm spending seven unadulterated hours of concentration and those hours are a gift.

His attentions are irrelevant bookends. I'm the main attraction.

sleep is a crutch for the weak

2010-11-04T09:08:00.008-04:00

You are a so beautiful lady . . . Why for you live this bad neighborhood? Huh? Is not good . . . No very nice. Why you no live somewhere nicer? Nice neighborhood. Huh?

This from my cab driver last night, whose services I employed to ferry me up to my new sublet in the nosebleed section (once I realized the 1 train was going to continue crawling the whole way uptown at two miles an hour). He hit every red light on Broadway, his boxy SUV clanking and wheezing, the interior construction squeaking against the body with every start and stop. I think he even slowed to catch a few just to drive up the meter.

I mean, I get it. Gatsby said the very same when he drove me home on Tuesday (read: Wednesday, 3 am). This is not a very nice neighborhood, young lady.

But Gatsby, bless his lion heart, meant it with some degree of protective concern. Cabbie Douchebag only wanted to give me grief, accept my 2o% tip and burn rubber down the block before I could get my key in the front door. You'd think if he'd been truly worried, he might have idled there to see me safely inside.

Ahem. New York is never a simple barrel of charms. (Watch for the wrist-chomping piranhas.)

Not that I have been a resident of this neighborhood long enough to discern said charms. I moved in shotgun style on Monday night and have come and go at 8 and 2 am daily. It is little more than a bed, two loquacious cats and the piano sonata I wake to on my cell alarm.

This week, I left the idylls of underemployment behind. One part time job mushroomed into two full time jobs, and I logged 44 hours in four days, plus the midday commute to Newark. I also fought off a flu with little more than Odwalla juice and Emergen-C.

The best part is, I'm so tired I can barely think. (Perchance to dwell.) My eyes are two deflated punching bags, glued to my face like a third grade art project. Were it not for my artists' masochism, I might have slept last night–but no—I went dancing.

I went dancing because Spumoni was there (two nights only, direct from Livorno!) and because I keep my promises. (That and my body begged for it—I can dance when I cannot stand.) I went dancing and it was delirium, another world's fatigue in alien legs, a dream I don't remember.

I sweat. And it was not the sweat of crowded milongas in overhot rooms; it was a fever flush, clammy and delicate, as the whole room blinked and buzzed around me.

I woke up this morning to the spareness and the rain and I was cured. Tango as bloodletting?

Highlight of the week: I am halfway to a draft.

steel girder tightrope act

2010-11-02T00:05:00.007-04:00

A mooch no more.

I woke up this morning with my annual malaise, after a night of restless thrashing and an eighteen hour weekend of tango. But there is no ache or sneeze I would not weather for the tanda I had last night. Or the sore soled bliss of dancing my blues away.

State of the Union, November 2010: As of tonight, I live in the nosebleed section of the Island, way up above the fray, just southeast of the Cloisters. I will miss my borrowed family very much, but not the feeling of being constantly in their way. My routine will now have to swell to accommodate three part-time jobs and a beastly commute, but I am once again paying my way, living with one of my best friends, her fiance and their feline entourage—practicing for my illustrious future as Spinster Cat Hag. I will be 27 in 25 days and I have boiled my life down to one overlarge suitcase, a backpack, a laptop and my yoga mat. I have the better part of my health and so do the people who matter to me. With the possible exception of my winter clothes and seven boxes of books in storage, I need nothing else.

bottoms up

2010-10-29T10:26:00.004-04:00

Last night, over a scotch in a West side Irish pub, my dear friend's boyfriend cautioned me, in no uncertain terms, to pull my head out of my ass.

I release you, he said, from the idea that you don't deserve to be loved.

Understand by 'loved,' he means decently, seriously and reciprocally. Not the way I am accustomed to begging for scraps. His counsel boiled down to this: I settle for less than I deserve.

And, while I seem constantly to forgive and forget the parade of clowns (both sad and sinister), he remains mystified. You're a good looking girl. You're smart. And you are attracting only douchebags.

He is absolutely right. My heart is a dilapidated movie theatre, selling discount tickets to card-carrying emotional retards. I might as well hang a sign in the box office window that reads: Functioning Adults Need Not Apply.

Back in the city with my life around my ankles, this becomes all too clear. Not only do I obsessively cater to the needs of these Crassanovas, it seems to be what I do best.

I quit adulthood. I piled all my possessions together, the lovingly appointed apartment, the big-girl 9-to-5, the Weekender subscription, and turned my back, flipping a match over my shoulder on the way out of town.

Since the Plague of Locusts, I made the Big Decision, hopped the graveyard freighter to somewhere else, hid out in the tropics pondering my navel, and came back to New York the way I came the first time: with a suitcase and a prayer.

But everyone's first question was, "What happened with Gatsby?"

This is my fault. The hope of him was all my world. And then it wasn't.

I've come to care less. I've cultivated a quiet corner for myself in midtown Manhattan. My life got boring. I work, I dance, I practice yoga and I write. I make bulleted to-do lists and cross things out. I spend time with friends, but I eat a lot of pre-tango sandwiches on the sofa by myself.

I'm getting more and more comfortable sitting in the bathtub of me.

the bathers think islands are separate like them

2010-10-24T10:49:00.007-04:00

I've been trying to tune out the noise. To stretch my arms above my yoga mat, to connect my feet into the floor, to be fully present in close embrace, to walk slowly and with purpose, to breathe. New York is a different place now for me, less full of traps and ambushes, more full of friends and fountains and ethnic food. The drama is gone. And I am my own island, connected underground by years of glacial earth to other islands, tethered to my friends and to my loves. The lava cooled and I got strong.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programing of self-growth and survival skills. I have friends to see and brunches to eat, muscles to stretch and tango to practice. I have hours to spend starting at an empty page. The dance card of my day is full.

on drifting

2010-10-16T20:05:00.005-04:00

I gave a dollar to the man on the subway singing "Yo Soy Feliz." It was just him and a guitar. He wasn't even loud, just walking up and down the car, singing in a mournful way.

Then I danced. For the eighth night in nine nights.

Hail Bohemia.

persephonia

2010-10-16T19:14:00.003-04:00

It is autumn, and I am sad.

But it is a softening sadness, a sinking into the crust of the earth before the snow sort of sadness. It is a sadness I need, a cycle I understand. I walk through city streets and feel the world shutting down for the winter, the air closing in with chill, the sky going grey, the trees letting go. I shove my hands in my pockets and listen to the same three songs, every year. I walk with wisdom, the summer languor setting bones, my steps slower, more even, my softening gaze.

I think maybe I live backwards. Ever since high school, in perfect Pioneer Valley New England farmland, I have come to love this time of year. Because it brought sweaters and scarves and hot steaming coffee, hours spent in drafty classrooms or overheated libraries, surrounded by books, searching for transcendence—eating the pomegranate, accepting the escort to the Underworld, and finding the fire within to light up the night.

It gets cold, too cold. Things get hard. It hurts more when you fall. More knees are skinned, and tights are scraped by bloody knees. The night is longer, lonelier. The stars pierce the firmament. The moon hangs heavy and far away.

I need this and I don't know why. I feel a pheonix-like affinity for the dying and the coming back. I imagine I will sprout from the frozen cobblestones come Spring, a newly reincarnate something green.

The cold is calming. I fight my quiet battles with a little added peace. And so, some pieces fall into place without event, a path emerges through the Ramble in the park. A place to live, a thing to do, a plan.

Some days are better than others. Some friends show up in ways I never knew. I am grateful, even as I flounder. I achieve the seemingly impossible: in certain moments, things aren't all wrong.

on growing up

2010-10-10T19:17:00.004-04:00

Ten years ago my family landed in Vernon, VT, armpit of New England, ending a four year streak on the road. I had never been in one place much longer than a school year or two, and being nerdy, fat and pathologically uncool, I hadn't held on to many friendships along the way.

In this tiny town, I suffered a particularly cruel and unusual eighth grade year before moving on to the hallowed halls of academe for four blessedly continuous years of prep school. This settled stint in the foothills of the Green Mountains marked the longest consecutive stretch that I (and my three man nuclear family) found myself in one place. It wasn't perfect—I would never choose it now that age and taste have intervened—but it was close enough to home, simply by virtue of the fact that we never had to leave it.

The friends I made in that stupid town are some of the best I've ever made. As satellite students, local yokels, we were left stranded in the cow pastures when the rest of the students went home to their glamorous lives in Seoul, Sydney and Durham, NH. We spent our summers driving through corn fields and scaring each other in the dark. We played board games with my parents, we loitered in movie theatre parking lots. We did wholesome things in the name of adolescence and stealthy things in the name of adulthood. They indulged in a few illegal substances and I baked pie. We were good kids and we still are.

Saturday, the first of us got married. And so it was that the guy who once passed out under my Twister mat said "I do."

Of the four of us, I will be the last to go. I was stuck without a plus one at a table of the affianced. The wizened New Yorker drifting through bad boyfriends and irrelevant career moves and her better, more practical friends. Who—I like to think—love me in spite of my incurable self-sabotage.

We may not keep in touch as well as we should. We may not see each other more than once a year. But these guys know me (perhaps better than I know myself). They have inspired me and will inspire me for years. Someday, if I have sons, I will want to raise them to be just like them—the kind of men at a wedding who ask their spinster cat hag high school friend to dance.

no small victory

2010-10-08T01:22:00.005-04:00

How it feels to get through today:

Wake up in a sweat. Take a couple pills. Clean house. Cry into yogurt.
Type aimlessly. Stare at blank screen. Shower.
Dress for therapy. One foot at a time. Talk too much.
Well tears. Wipe tears. Confess and be absolved.
Sit in Starbucks. Eat salad out of Tupperware. Stir sugar into coffee.
Type aimlessly. Stare at blank screen. Spy.
Wander. Purchase paperback. Go home with groceries.
Email furiously. Talk to best friend. Attend lecture.
Attempt to stay awake. Attempt not to text. Attempt to pay attention.
Read on the subway. Grilled cheese sandwich. Glass of wine.
Television, television, television.
Stay up too late. Wear socks to bed.

Dr. H offered to see me for a while gratis. He said, given the month I've had, I'm doing extraordinarily well. Whatever happens happens. And he said he's proud.

Survival mode is a force to be reckoned with, propelling me into the world even when all I manage out there is to drool onto my laptop and people watch, poke through vegetable stands and window shop.

I get up and scribble lists onto legal pads just so I can cross things off. Set achievable goals and hack them one by one. Mail things. Make outlines. Cheat. Do what I know I should.

With the exception of a few texts and a few rounds of Is he?/Will he?, today was for me. I spent it with a roll of emotional duct tape, sealing the window cracks and making great big exes over doors. There are candles in my basement, unlit, and batteries in the fridge. My bathtub is leaking full with water. These are things I know to do—the lecture, the therapy, the afternoon out.

Only difference is this time, I've lost my conviction. I do all this in spite of the feeling (to fight the feeling) of wanting to hurl myself off a skyscraper, just to feel the freedom of the fall. You know, without the telltale splat at the end.

I am either much too weak or far too strong.

honesty alert

2010-10-07T10:38:00.005-04:00

The moment you realize someone is not the man you thought he was is like seeing your parents fallible for the first time. The Christmas tree crashes onto the coffee table, everyone is miserable, and no one can fix it.

Maybe it is time to admit I fell for the dream of him, the rest of him rosed over by the glow of a dying summer. The collapse of a lucky streak. The end of a long string of let downs and bad romance. The beginning of something to believe in. This had all the earmarks of a fairy tale, ergo I ought not be surprised to watch it devolve nightmarishly into typical every day tragedy, one heart bullet-grazed, the other smeared against the kitchen wall.

I thought I found a grown-up. What I found was another Batman, a boy who still thinks he can control everything in his Universe and does not appreciate biological proof to the contrary. I thought I found someone to share the burden, and yet here I am alone in left field again, mustering strength from the reserve tank to take care of myself and move on.

This is not to say he won't turn things around, show up again with chivalry and platitudes. Pitch the woo. Sweep me off my overlarge feet. But if he comes a'callin,' he will have lost a little of his charming veneer. I'll be accepting a little less than I deserve. Demanding a little more in reparations.

Maybe the lesson here is people are imperfect creatures–and dating just one long minefield of discovery. Perhaps we ought to assume the worst in people, to mollify our inevitable disappointment. Start disappointed, end up pleasantly surprised?

But I have bigger fish to fry. And miles to go before I sleep. I wake up every day in panic. I belong here, I don't belong here. I can make it, then I can't. Things make sense for only moments at a time. I have to find a way to breathe easier. Be solid on my own axis. Find neutral. Because the highs never last and the lows are starting to wear me out.

I was wrong to think I could live out of a suitcase. Wrong to think I could beat the system. And wrong to think I could borrow the feeling of someone else's family home. Without four walls to oneself and a sleeping pallet, one is always asking favors, growing debts. Feeling like a bad barnacle on someone else's hull.

And all this drifting just fills you with empty.

house of ill humors

2010-10-05T20:51:00.009-04:00

Fasten your seat belts, folks. We're in for some turbulence.

Ugh. And that sentence came after reading this week's Ben Zimmer in the Times Sunday magazine.

I am back on the big loopy bus ride that is New York, and as such have developed a new and increasingly startling feeling of fellowship with manic depressives the world over. Time to climb aboard the Bipolar Express. Hold on to your hats. For every downturn, an upswing. And vice fucking versa.

For one, it's freezing. I am freezing.

For two, I currently depend on the kindness of others for shelter. Free to go anywhere, but nowhere is home. On that note, three: I spent the better part of today touring the lesser part of Bushwick with pathologically positive Realtor Adam, a five-foot-four and bearded dogma-Vegan who took me from dump to dumpier dump, finding charm wherever least appropriate: windowless bedrooms built for dwarves, yellowed toilet seats, cockroaches.

Four, money. As in: I have none. As in . . . uhoh.

Then again, it is fall. Grey, chilly, sweater-wearing fall. Almost everyone I love is here and I am dancing. That I have. I get up every day and I get something done. I clean something, cook something, stretch something. Fill in a form, send out a cover letter, make a list and cross things off. I dance at night, so I sleep now—quel relief. I get to be with Peter, who will always be my family. Yet still I cannot shake the feeling that I'm missing something; something isn't right. If only I could fix that one factor, the rest would fall into place—right? And hum to the frequency of heavenly alignment? Because being 26 going on 27 only begs the question: what if it never gets better? What if this awful feeling of mismatch and discord persists? Where to then? And how?

These are questions I must answer. Questions I have chosen to answer from the unemployment line. Problems I have chosen to make harder to solve because I just can't help it.

And if being here, lost in my own godknowswhat—my freefalling Hail Mary pass at happiness and an honest living—means I can do that, well then I must be making progress.

minor victory

2010-10-05T02:22:00.002-04:00

I slept for ten hours.

cabin pressure

2010-10-02T02:10:00.006-04:00

So I remember once upon a time, my mother would invoke the teachings of Ram Dass and chide me gently to Be Here Now.

Then, tucked in the spine of a purchase at the emporium, a bookmark that read: You Are Here. A bookmark I later saw in the bat cave of the G.I.Q.

Always I have been told to take comfort in the chaos. To find stillness. Today I flew (and I hate to fly) the length of the eastern seaboard, and survived. (read: cheated death again.) It only took a Xanax, a bag of gummy worms and the prayer-like recitation of all forty-four U.S. presidents in chronological order to calm me down. We got up and stayed up. I drank my can of cranberry juice. I read my dime store crime novel in the crisp blue dome.

Then the descent—nosing through a low, flat layer of cloud cover, sprawling dunes of sugar—into grey and blustery New York. Immediately, my armor intact, the cocoon of aloneness. My anonymous shroud. Earbuds, paperback, eyes on cell.

I found my city loud and proud and indifferent. I hit the pavement, matching pace. I took my computer to the Genius Bar for a one am repair, navigating sidewalks busy still at that hour on Central Park South. I could have danced all night. But I seem to have lost my edge.

And I may have lost my nerve.

I never sleep before I fly

2010-10-01T01:59:00.007-04:00

Two epiphanies today.

If I rotate my shins inward in downward dog (adhomukha svanasana), I can fold my chest farther into the floor, my heart closer to my thighs, and it will feel as though something secret has been unlocked.

And if I take a chisel to my own self-erected wall of bullshit, I'm ready to admit just what a sap I really am. I've been trying to tell you all and, by extension, myself, that the Universe wants me to go back to New York. That I have plans, a life, a reason for existing on or around that island of insanity. And all of that is true. My friends are there, my focus is there and there is where I dance. Perhaps I have been happiest there. Perhaps the most miserable. (Yes, I flip more waffles than a house of pancakes.) But the gods' honest is this: I am going back for one thing only. Absolution.

I am going back to have my heart rebroken.

I cried like an idiot tonight, which was not altogether inappropriate. Tomorrow at 2:19 pm, I am going to do something so incredibly stupid. Sure, there are other valid reasons, and sure, a suitcase full of money could fall on my head, but really this is the romantic in me, staging a kamikaze run at a very uncertain endgame. So I pack my big red suitcase, send off the impossibly large check to COBRA and by this time tomorrow, I'll be back in the Tour d'Ivoire with $300 to my name, two pairs of jeans and one set of ratty, sweaty dance shoes.

Everything else is in storage. Everything else is illusion. I have become a laptop and a pair of yoga pants. A notebook and a mug of coffee. A regimen of vitamins. Crippling indecision. Vertiginous awe. A killer cocktail of gratitude and pique.

New York will fold me back into her batter, or else she'll reject me like a mismatched kidney and I'll be back to the lifeboat, rowing. I wish I were not the sort of girl who said "what if." I wish I didn't take chance after second chance, hurl myself at all my lessons the hard way.

But I have a book and a bag of gummy worms for the plane. A little lunch in a paper sack. My rootless abandon intact. I'll find out soon enough.

losing farther, losing faster

2010-09-30T00:58:00.007-04:00

Everything is wrong.

It is wrong to go, it is wrong to stay. Wrong to hope, worse not to.

I went on a date last night. With the Pilot, erstwhile pen pal from Hobe Sound, flier of cargo planes. Divorced father of three. He talked me into it really, he made the leap from casual drinks and Where In The World Have You Been? to seafood dinners on the waterway. Blackened grouper and hog snapper with hollandaise. Drinks on a dock, ring games in a tiki bar—and one very blustery moonlit stroll on the beach chasing night crabs. It was nice (but it wasn't a disaster.) It was not the same. No trains collided in my thought bubble. The earth kept right on earthing.

It was wrong to have spent the better part of this month in exile eating my feelings. I come back to New York chubbed up on my own cooking. I come back on an afternoon plane with a suitcase full of summer clothes.

Don't ask me what the hell I plan to do with my life, but I have balls in the air. Balls to the wall. Balls between a rock and a hard place. If it were not for the generosity of the people I love, I'd be out on my lily white Irish [expletive] in t minus . . . No, really. How much longer can I make a makeshift tripod out of my failing sea legs and all this kindness? I am in a borderless country with no currency to repay my favors. So I cook for people. I take out the trash. I try not to cry every day.

I return to the Tour d'Ivoire, a little worse for the wear. I cross my fingers for that killer railroad apartment at the end of this tunnel. To scrubbing kitchen counters like my life depends on it. To dancing every night. And to finishing those samples. Daily and with dedication. In the library. Because I'll want to be out of the way.

If I've learned anything from you 2010, it is that the world can (and likely will) come crashing down around you. It's only a matter of when and how loud the din.

a bird may love a fish, signore, but where would they live

2010-09-25T13:36:00.006-04:00

Oh how time flies when we are a mess. Can't sleep at night, so you sleep all day survival mode.

Yoga helps. Yesterday I was complimented on my pigeon (salamba kapotasana). I wandered around with a pocketful of prana all afternoon.

But then again, this march forward. Days, weeks—a month passes. I haven't done much here except drink coffee on a humid balcony until my heart starts racing or the sun sets. I've made some meals, written some dreadful poems, sat in the recesses of my own panic until my fingers pruned. I've run the gamut a few times over, come to some conclusions and changed my mind. I feel at home here. I am lost. I belong in New York?

No one ever told me life would be comfortable, but surely some people wake up in the morning without feeling their chests constrict. I look around at Normal and I start to resent the hell out of myself, every melancholy moment of me. Where is my quiet cocktail by the pool? Where is the day I don't doubt every decision I make?

Hell, don't feel sorry for me. I chose this. Remember? I said I was happy living out of a suitcase. I said I never wanted to own anything or love anybody every again. And I don't. I do.

a poet's guide to courtship

2010-09-19T22:45:00.004-04:00

What do I do when I cannot write? I read.

Needless to say, I've been doing quite a bit of that. Poems, mostly, snippets of them running ticker tape through my head, which feels a bit like Times Square before a matinee. Which is to say: hot. Loud. Insufferable.

Yeats, that old dog, cheated on his wife and died of ripeness. But still he had the nads to write "Never give all the heart"—and bully for him. His reason:

". . . for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss."

The audacity of his advice to young lovers, the men who come calling with their toolboxes full of torture devices, astounds me. Thank you, Billy Butler, for legitimizing the age old tradition of head games and heart wrecking. The Ophelias of the world plug their noses and practice drowning.

A little advice to those listening: We the weaker sex do not prefer to be left in the dark by the phone.

I once thought I could sell a dating manual for men that would fit onto a business card. One side would say simply: "Man up and state your business." The other would read: "Decide what you want and then be there. Do that."

That is all we want. To know. Think of all the angst you could eliminate, the analysis of actions, the overanalysis of tone. I have a hundred women behind me. You are not special. We do not fall automatically in love. We are not immediately obsessed, monogramming towels and tote bags.

You are not special because you are a man and I am a neurotic creature. You are special because you are special to me. But I can live without you. My brain was born for other, bigger questions and I resent the space you take with your flimsy indecision.

I, we, do not need you to make the world any harder. So spare us the decade of drama from kiss to kiss. Declare your intentions and be done with it. Any passionate woman worth her salt will not shy away from certainty. For chrissakes, it will give her a chance to breathe and be herself.

Dorothy Parker said it best. "I should think it would be so sweet to be sure."

To tell the truth, I'm humbled and a little humiliated by my own inability to break the cycle. I've been down here for eighteen days now, with nothing but space. The precious commodity of time was mine for the taking and I have next to nothing to show for myself. A string of wasted days. Nights undersleeping, mornings oversleeping and nightmare after nightmare.

Right before I left, I bought myself a card, one of those inspirational messages printed in block letters from Barnes & Noble. And it says: "This is your world. Shape it or someone else will." I suppose that's what I'm most afraid of here. That I'm allowing someone else shape my world for the worse.

the other side of insomnia

2010-09-16T11:22:00.004-04:00

On the dream train last night, there were helicopters crashing overhead, buses falling from the sky, and a semi that drove off a building to erupt in flames below. Flames I had to run from. Sprinting along the top of this train—which was moving through a metropolis—too slowly to outrun the perils and projectiles.

This comes only a few nights on the heels of the sailboat crash with the pontoon planes and the giant rock. The lover who left me howling in the hallways while he danced with everyone but me.

Something tells me I ought not sleep alone.

hello cruel world

2010-09-15T00:22:00.006-04:00

You've been unkind this year, and you know it. I can only hope you know what you're doing.

Because I wonder. Through the bombardment, in the acid drizzle on the arid ground, there have been trail markers. Haven't there?

And haven't I followed them? I cut and I ran. I put the moving van behind me. I quit my job. I disinfected, showered, boiled. Folded, laundered, packed. I ran away and danced. You said go; I went. You said no and I turned tail. I drank your little bottle of yes. I closed my eyes. I leaped.

I'm beginning to think we're in Acting 101, doing trust falls, and you're the skinny kid with the dirty sneakers and the smelly pits. Your arms outstretched, your palms sweaty, you give every outward appearance of wanting to catch me, but your bony elbows are no match for my weight and don't I look foolish? A little stupider every time I fold my arms across my chest and keel backwards.

And yet, bruised everything, bruised ego, I continue. I scan the horizon for mirages, perch like a yogi on the mountain, blur my gaze to the future, listening to every wayward wind current for direction.

So far it says: love while you can. It says: write faster. It also says: be careful or it all goes up in flames.

It even says: Brooklyn . . . something about tuna and Mies and tea.

The odds ought to improve eventually.

portrait of the artist

2010-09-13T01:07:00.002-04:00

Oh, lead me to a quiet cell
Where never footfall rankles,
And bar the window passing well,
And gyve my wrists and ankles.

Oh, wrap my eyes with linen fair,
With hempen cord go bind me,
And, of your mercy, leave me there,
Nor tell them where to find me.

Oh, lock the portal as you go,
And see its bolts be double….
Come back in half an hour or so,
And I will be in trouble.

-Dorothy Parker

every time it matters all my words desert me

2010-09-12T00:38:00.006-04:00

When everything else fails, and we are left to pull our pieces back together, all misshapen with superglue, we turn to food. Some cook, some eat, others mainline Doritos and marshmallow Fluff.

I cook. I chop and pinch and sully pots. I stand before a hot surface and make sense out of so many disparate somethings. Form something tangible, taste-able, out of a bag of chaos. The whole process comforts me: fish market, grocery store, recipe book. Cutting board, spatula, sauce pan.

Tonight it was simple. Halibut Livornese, zucchini and summer squash. Served with rosemary grissini, truffle sottocenere and champagne. We sat on the deck and took stock. We ate our feelings, whatever they happened to be.

My September sojourn has presented me with this orgy of options. I have no answers for you—or anyone. But I can say this: I am sitting still. Listening for the frogsongs as they come, obeying what signals I am sent, trudging across finish lines and spinning my idle wheels.

When I can't think what to say (or think, or write), I use the kitchen. Take out the olive oil and basil and build something. That something never lasts, but a task is a task. A meal is a meal—structure made and dismantled.

I become secondary, with people to feed. And that feels good. Because otherwise, I revert to mooning, to melancholy, to sitting on bar stools tracing question marks across the room.

I don't know what to make of him, of me, of any of this. So I make dinner.

labor pains

2010-09-07T22:52:00.007-04:00

Sometimes you just need a margarita. Or twelve.

Tonight, of course, I couldn't make use of that particular coping mechanism. Lest I counteract my 3oo dollar antibiotic cycle and risk the mysterious "very bad reaction" the pharmacist foretold. But I made a few anyway and that was a party. The ladies drank them. And god saw that it was good.

There is such a thing as Girls' Night, and it covers all manner of sins. We have cultivated this tradition across the ages. We the seed gatherers, the wheat threshers, the women. From a ruddy congregation in the dark of the signal fire to the more finely evolved modern survival schema of baked goods and elastic waistbands, we've been making molehills out of mountains for centuries.

You see, there are moments in every woman's life that call for introspection, and there others that require processing—by committee. Times get tough enough, hurts get harsh enough, the lemon pile reaches the flood line, et voilà! The herd convenes for baying and keening and the licking of wounds.

A good Girls' Night can be anything, anywhere. A terrible movie and a ten ton tub of popcorn. Microwave lasagne out of the cardboard carton. Sex and the City episodes on DVD. A six am drunken pizza party to ring in the new year. A handful of Kleenex and a bottle of wine. Fat pants and brownies. We are adaptable. We adapt.

Then there is Mexican Night, a particularly heartwarming subgenre involving equal parts estrogen, tequila and avocado. It doesn't take much—I've seen this manifest at Chili's bars and grills nationwide. But the medicine is no less potent. It's your bottle of XXX moonshine under the bathroom vanity cabinet. You pull these stops on special occasions and under duress. Or, you know, just because. (Although, at least in the lifespan of the average American woman, it's never "just because." Who among us can safely recall a day without a tragedy to tackle, else a victory to flaunt?) It's never the inbetween, ladies. The dog faces either upward or down. We peak and we valley. And in the hollows we seek solace in sisterhood and salted rims.

On one such evening, Valentine's Day, 2006, I split my middle finger open on a can of black beans making enchiladas to soak up a piña colada sobfest. Outside, former frat brothers marched up and down 3rd Avenue with bodega bouquets to escort their J Crew clad girlfriends to overpriced table d'hotes. Inside, my friend the EMT superglued me back to single girl wholeness and we went right on weeping and wailing, cursing the Hallmark holidays.

Even as a kid, I sensed the magic. I wasn't so tall then; I used chiles out of a can and I made a few righteous messes of home and hearth, but I knew. There are certain demons that can only be fought with cayenne peppers and grated cheese.

A sprig of cilantro, lime juice in a paper cut, the clink of grocery store glassware . . . the dosage doesn't have to be exact to drown out the din. Even for a moment. A few women come together over a bowl of corn chips and poof: All that ails you goes up in a cloud of calories.

Tonight was no different. The day after Labor Day, when the whole world went back to work. All our summer hopes began to spoil in the fruit basket. And, well, somebody somewhere must have summoned the Kraken. We merely answered its call. With Sauza Gold and grouper tacos.

Maybe, for an hour or two anyway, we feel a little less alone.

brace yourself like a man

2010-09-06T23:44:00.005-04:00

I'm going to wear my underpants on the outside for a moment and say that, if wishes were time machines, I'd go back to Baltimore and call for an immediate do-over.

Of course wishes are not time machines. Nor are they horses. Nor do they grow on trees. They are only wishes, and no matter how hard you think on them, they will not bend your life to their parameters. The meat grinder moves on and makes of you what it will.

If you are like me, you believe in rhyme before reason. That there are forces of fate working in defiance of our comprehension, with little latent 'ah-hah's weeks, months—years—down the road to look forward to. Non-believers beware, you doubt these truths at your own peril. Or perhaps you prefer chaos. Maybe the void makes more sense.

All I know is I struggle with Why. And as each of my dreams and limbs in turn are mangled and misshapen, I prefer to wait it out, rather than wrestle with the senselessness of a human life span.

Oh, for another 140 years.

this modern love

2010-09-02T01:26:00.009-04:00

Call me a voyeur, but when a couple of Yankee-clad hipsters* get engaged in my immediate vicinity, the cell phone camera comes forth to document the occasion. With irony. Lots of irony.

What is it about our generation that we must make our every moment public? One too many superheroes in our childhood cartoons? This the emotional equivalent of wearing our underpants on the outside, but we do it anyway. We have started to live like snowmen, rolling our insides around accumulating icy girth, content worthy of Facebook and bloggery.

Then again, this is a big lonely of a world. We can connect to anyone—friends, loved ones, perfect strangers—just by logging on to one device or another. But here are two people celebrating a milestone and, for better or for worse, they are all alone in a stadium of 50,000.

So alone, the newly affianced lady feels she must opt for the armpit shot to catalogue her moment. Perfect or imperfect.

I don't know whether I found this sad or savagely uplifting at the time, but based on their subdued smirks, I'm going with the former.

Just who do we think we are?

*Please note the fauxhawk on #28.

road trip, part two of two

2010-09-01T01:27:00.005-04:00

After 23 hours, the speed limit increased to 70 mph, the highways flattened out to a sun-bleached shade of bone grey, and the sky cracked open to let pass the rain clouds.

A windy Florida night gapes around me, midnight blue and humid. And the world seems suddenly very big.

I am grateful to be here. So grateful. For the first time in months, maybe years, I am supported. I am sinking into the musty sheets of my mother's second bedroom, the safety net of all safety nets, overlooking the Intracoastal effing Waterway, and surely that spells paradise. So why am I suddenly overcome by the incontrovertible lonelies?

Answer: It is time to face the big girl music.

Because, maybe she got me here . . . Maybe a confluence of Universal factors stuck a finger in my life and stirred the pot. Maybe the shit hit the fan and I had the brass to make bold moves. But now it's my turn. There's nobody but me in this damned psychic meadow. My choices are being etched in ink. And I'll have nobody left to blame if I fall on my face.

Now comes the hard part. Getting up and writing applications. Studying algebra. Resumes and cover letters. Personal statements. Overcoming crippling self doubt. Then I pack it up and go home (quote/unquote) with little guidance and no guarantees.

One month, two months, three—the difference isn't monumental. Tango would have sucked me back to shore soon enough. My wasted New Yorker of a heart thuds in its shell. Something in me cries out for chaos and corner delis.

I go back to nothing. Jobless, apartmentless and loveless. I go back with guts and hope to make an end run at the pursuit of happiness, but there are no absolutes. Don't get me wrong, I'm going back anyway. For the above stated reasons and then a few. But I know (and y'all know) full well, that there are always alternatives, unhappy alternatives, to that which we close our eyes for all those lonely 2ams in exile.

Hard to explain to anyone, let alone the Internet, that in place of certainty, I've got nothing but good omens. And I'm going on them anyway.

road trip, part one of two

2010-08-30T23:13:00.005-04:00

America appears both innocent and sinister from the interstate.

Eleven hours out of New York and the difference is clear. The salad bars are full of canned beets and wilty lettuce, plastic ladles in assorted crocks, ubiquitous bacon. The everyday staples of city life: New York Times, coconut water, whole grain bread, are few and far between. Billboards don't advertise lifestyle living or hipster trends, but that largely unclassifiable "shit you need" factor—cheap places to sleep and all-you-can-eat-buffets—gas/food/lodging and cheap cigarettes.

It made me realize how simultaneously vital the city is, and yet—how ridiculous. We become accustomed to everything at our fingertips. We either grow into richer, more evolved consumers, or we become finicky yuppies who, when unleashed on the quote/unquote 'real world' are ill-prepared for reality. I mean, really, we have wasabi peas and hazelnut gelato available 24/7 in our convenience stores.

I suppose this month (and yes, that's the final timetable) will be a bit of an adventure in normalcy and my ability to adapt. After five years in New York, I've been thoroughly citified: acclimated to public solitude, multitasking and tuning out the background noise. Instinctively, I brace my face away from bus exhaust, I can apply eye makeup anywhere—in subway windows, on park benches, in transit and on the fly. I know the city by zones, train stops and restaurants. I can acquire almost anything in any neighborhood.

Like it or not, the land of shouting crazies and midnight falafel has become home to me. Maybe not the whole package 'home,' the fantasy of what that word is supposed to hold in four measly letters, but 'home' in the sense that I have built my life there. A life which transcends even the basics of job and apartment, the mechanics of waking up and hoarding food in winter. A life that works just as well–if not better—out of a suitcase.

For better or for worse, this is my city. I know, I know, last month I hated it here. This place is a beast. A sensory barrage. A swift kick in the everything—and that's all before breakfast. But, even so, it took trying to leave to make me finally feel at home. Or home enough.

Five years ago, I moved to New York with nothing but a backpack and a laptop, chasing some harebrained dream of being an actress. I survived infestations, shady plumbing, studio living and bar rot, among other things. I have conquered and been conquered. I've gone to galas at the Waldorf and I've eaten diner pancakes at three am. From the Met to the Manhattan Bridge, from squalorous dumps to slinky lounges and four star bars. It's all my city. A new world every block. And it's home. Or the closest I'm going to come to it for now.

At least when I wake up in New York, the world makes sense. The structure of the grid cast out like sonar, the x factor of travel time and train delays, and of course, the anonymity.

If traveling is mystery and newness, discovering the rules from the road, home should be where the rhythm makes most sense. And unfortunately, I picked a place that didn't entirely suit me. And now that's where I belong.

Maybe someday I'll get my herb garden and laundry lines, a herd of cherubic children in ladybug galoshes playing in the mud puddles. Or maybe I'll die in a cramped apartment lined to the rafters with leather bound tomes. Life has become one big choose-your-adventure storybook and I'm flipping back and forth like a madwoman, leaving a lot up to Fate and fancy, but feeling free.

So I've got a month. One month to get my shit together, to get good and ready to go back and hit the ground hard.

I guess woke up one morning this month and decided I wanted to keep doing things the hard way. But hey, that's just how I roll.

or are we dancer

2010-08-20T11:33:00.014-04:00

Well, he kissed me.

After all that, an afterthought. For me, it was lost in the sea of a thousand bloodthirsty bandoneóns, tugging my heart down to the depths and Davy Jones.

I should probably talk about Baltimore. Because Baltimore changed everything.

I had worried I wouldn't be able to keep up, that my legs would quit from the hip joint down and I'd be left to bleed while the whole world turned around me. But I matched pace, class after class, milonga after milonga, for thirteen hours a day. I danced. I danced until it hurt to stop, until a piece of my own toe flesh came off in my hand. (I know, hardcore.)

It was that easy. Coffee, sweatpants, dance shoes. Run a brush through your hair. Class for seven hours, práctica. Stretch. Moan. Fall face down on the bed for five minutes, then roll off groaning to the shower. Cotton dress, eye makeup, splash of scent. Leave everything behind you but your heels and your wristband, pinned discretely to the hem of your dress. Walk unladen through hotel halls to the swirling eddy of bodies orbiting each other, a mass of man and woman turning back the hands of a giant clock. Dance, and time submits. Dance until dawn turns the giant windows cobalt blue. Pry your throbbing, soggy feet from the straps of your shoes and plod barefoot down the marble floors. Sigh in the elevator, insert a key card, let the heavy hotel room door click shut behind you. Don't bother with the light. Let the dress slip to the floor. Brush teeth hastily, find a t-shirt and curl into bed. Sleep if you can. Wake to the bleating of a bland alarm and repeat.

You see, there wasn't hardly time to play "he loves me, he loves me not." We managed only a few stolen kisses between workshops and dance halls, between rock hard sleep and morning reveille. A hand in my hair as I slept, an arm around my waist in the dark. An electric glance across a class.

We hardly even danced together. I trolled the edges of the floor, avoiding mouth breathers and back-breaking old men, waiting for dances, enjoying the echo of di Sarli in the gothic Ballroom, down my legs and through the floor. And he did the same. If I saw him standing there, I changed my course. Avert the eyes, scan the crowd. Make him wonder. It was my own dance, my counter cabeceo.

Never be caught staring longingly at a leader, begging for tandas. If that means fewer dances, it gives those dances dignity. I learned that in Baltimore—one of a million half-baked epiphanies that still hover in my ether, ready to spring.

Did I find tango, or did tango find me? It's been little more than a year since a New Years' resolution brought me to a snowy SoHo studio, since I started shifting weight on the subway platform, tracing tiny patterns with my toes. And here I am in the ocean of it, buoyant and baptized by the salt.

I've had lonely moments in this world none of my friends can quite comprehend, getting dolled up at midnight and leaving parties early. Walking home alone at 2, 3 and 4 am, shoe bag in hand, feeling the quiet ascend from the pavement. I've had to fight my worst insecurities, wait to be asked to dance by strangers, overcome my own perfectionism, learn to let go. I've forced myself to smile and start conversations where I otherwise might have bolted. By a slow pace, I forged friendships, made connections. I created a world for myself where, on any given night, I'll know someone out there on the dance floor. That recognition, that "Where have you been?" Like the man at the bodega in the cop shows who notices something's fishy when the girl hasn't been seen scrounging for Häagen Dazs three nights running. I remember when I first moved to this city; my mother told me to find a neighborhood bar. Well, ma, I found it.

What I take away from Baltimore, besides a flutter in my heart (akin to ostrich wings) and a dozen or so revelations about body mechanics and torsion and artistry, is simply that. Tango Element was the summer camp I never went to, the clique I never felt a part of, the peace of knowing in one moment that I am exactly where I ought to be. What I witnessed on that floor, in those classrooms, in myself . . . I lack the words.

I belong here.

From the girl who was always on the outside, this means everything. I know now this is not just some group of creepies who like to rub up against each other's cheeks and walk in step around a room counterclockwise. We are in this together—for one reason, for a million reasons, for the communal lack of reason, with a capital R. We are a family of students, learning from masters. Arch-tired and dancing anyway. A delicate hierarchy from Ludites to legends.

Ordo ab chao.

So forgive me for not having a list of moments to report. For thirteen hours a day, my eyes were closed. I was feeling with my feet. And everything else went away.

We finally danced on Sunday, ending the night and the festival with two tandas of utter transcendence. We drove home straight from the milonga, through the middle of the night, running on moments and kisses and turbo charged coffee. At seven am, he dropped me at my door. And reality returned.

Or maybe it didn't. The week has been a blur of dancing, tying off loose ends and falling flat on my fantastic face. I hesitate to jinx this by overworking the details, so I leave you, winking, on the threshold. I'm sure there'll be something to say when I land. For now, know that I fight the forces of vertigo, staring down the void beneath me as I cut chord after chord. I hear the steel snap behind me, the weightlessness encroaching. These are my last few days in New York for at least a month. I am leaving. Skis on at the top of the mountain, feet poised on the edge. But even as I do this, even as I squat in the eye of the self-created storm, I'm living a bit of a private fairy tale, dancing in a penthouse on the park.

He walked me home, he kissed me on the eyes.

only in nyc

2010-08-06T15:12:00.003-04:00

We are all doing our best.

gotta get behind the mule in the morning and plow

2010-07-27T15:46:00.008-04:00

I quit my job yesterday.

(Good sweet Jesus, that felt good to type.)

In light of recent circumstances (now I sound like my resignation letter), I'm soaring. I mean, I'm living out of a laundry basket, but I don't have it so bad after all, do I?

I'm having a steamy hot affair with my city before I leave her.

I slept until two on Sunday (much needed rest), then sat on the couch at the Ivory Tower watching 60 Minutes with one of my all-time favorite fellas and a G & T. I danced. I got up Monday morning, got a physical and, at four pm, gave my notice.

Then I lay on a blanket in Bryant Park and watched Monty Python's Holy Grail with about 2,500 other people eating hummus out of Whole Foods bags. I went to bed and woke up in a world with an expiration date. Crowded trains, catty bosses and that omni-pressive sense of pressure be damned.

I'm home free, Internet. Home freaking free. All that's stopping me now is me. And I feel like putting a stop to that, I'll tell ya.

support a slut

2010-07-27T13:14:00.003-04:00

In the name of the strong woman who sent me this link, I give you the new feminism (and the hope that we may each take the liberty to fashion our own).

on cutting my losses

2010-07-23T14:51:00.005-04:00

As it turns out, I wasn't all alone. Only mostly alone. Peter, in his infinite generosity, arranged for movers to turn up in hazard suits and help me throw the contents of our lives into cardboard boxes, one by one. I have no idea what went where—or how, or when—or in what condition, but it is done. Today at high noon, the boxes were loaded, the apartment cleared, and I walked away from the truck with nothing but my purse on my back. Just as some schmuck in a Corolla was pulling up with a spray can and a surgical mask to "treat the building."

You can't script this stuff, folks. It just happens. I walked away from a loaded moving truck, alone, and—just then, in that particular instant—the threat of rain became a reality of rain and an Amtrak rattled over the Hell Gate bridge. My cell battery died before I turned the corner.

I have gone off the grid.

In other news, I miss Peter and France so much it hurts. Now that my tenure at She Beast Enterprises, Inc. draws to an end, I'll never forgive myself for not telling her where she could stick it for denying my vacation time.

So excuse me today, world, for this little blip of melodrama. After all, what is there to do on an empty N train away from life as we know it but bawl all the way to Astoria Boulevard?

Time to go get "this too shall pass" tattooed on my forehead.

too late to turn back now

2010-07-21T12:03:00.003-04:00

Just got off the phone with the movers. And I quote: "Lady, I gotta tell ya, you are like, without a doubt, in the top two nicest people I've ever dealt with."

Because, apparently, when dealing with moving (third only to death and divorce on the traumatic life event ladder), most people resort to panic and blind rage.

Likely this is shock talking. I'm sure there'll be a very loud thud when I hit the ground—eventually. No money, no apartment, no bed. No job, no health insurance. And (for a few months anyway) no tango.

But for now, cool as a cucumber. Go figure.

time will do the talking

2010-07-19T15:08:00.007-04:00

I'm sure I have plenty to say about grad school and bed bugs, and the logistical nightmare of stress NYC—that harshest of mistresses—has foisted upon me, but this morning at least, I'm having a hard time concentrating.

When my mother, bless her heart, suggested I cut and run a month early, there was a not so small part of my heart that sank at the thought of closing doors and returning keys. Giving up my pied-a-terre, however humble, means an uphill trek back to this city, whenever that may be. And leaving, regardless of when I go, means absenting myself from the metropolitan milonga scene.

My very heart sags at the thought. I choke up and a little voice in my head says, "but . . . tango is all I've got . . ." Then my hair-holding, clothes ironing mother comes back with, "Yes, honey, but you need more than that." And she's right. The whole point of my great escape is to take the time to make my daily life a bearable place, to finagle a way to do what I love for a living, and to take a few deep breaths in a place that doesn't go out of its way to assault me on my way to the grocery store. It's only for a few months, and tango will still be there to come home to. Only, then it will be gravy, not just a bandaid slapped over a soul-sucking job and a sketchy living situation.

That said, I took grateful refuge in my dancing shoes this weekend. Sleepless from infestation nightmares, I strapped those puppies on for eight hours of workshops and seven hours of social dancing. By ten pm last night, I was sure my calf muscles would crystallize from fatigue, but I went out anyway and made a night of it. I danced my way to a place where I felt no pain, and I didn't stop where my partner started. I had some of the best dances of my life.

Maybe the Universe gives you a balmy break now and then, even as it throws you every last thing you can handle, like so many stink bombs and hand grenades.

part two: revenge of the slumlord

2010-07-18T14:32:00.006-04:00

Recap: We're moving.

My landlord refuses to have the building treated. And if this guy "can't even afford" the $250 inspection, imagine the results of filing complaints and legal formalities to force him. We were between a rock and a hard place before, with the gas situation: if we ratted him out, he would have been fined, bankrupted, and we'd have ended up in the cold anyway, so we spent the better part of the winter bundled by a space heater, living on take-out.

Now he's threatening me.

The Bug Dog Man identified three places where Champ found traces of live bed bug scent: the mattresses, the big blue corner couch, and the front door saddle. By his estimation, given that two out of three furniture pieces in question were brand new since we moved in, our apartment is not the source of the infestation. (My guess would be the basement full of the manky used furniture my landlord collects from his unsavory contractor friends—you know, the ones who built our building without filing the gas permit or measuring the doorframes.)

My landlord is a flaming retard. He has already made the rounds and told the other tenants how "those people in apartment five brought in bedbugs to the building" (how soon we became 'those people'), and is squawking that, since no one else has been affected, it must be our fault. So he calls and he yells and I get to feel small and helpless and alone, like a good girl should.

Then again, the last conversation we had ended with me barking, "You'll be hearing from my lawyer!" (I don't actually have a lawyer, but I've always wanted to say that.)

This too shall pass. Tomorrow morning I call the fumigators. And the movers. I will pack and load everything I own into a truck, and that truck will be nuked with an odorless, colorless gas that kills everything, in all stages of life, but dead. Then I will abandon the dowry of material possessions I have accumulated in my five years of adulthood (mostly books and cookware, because—hey—this is me we're talking about here) to a storage unit in the outer boroughs. Then I will skip town like my life depended on it.

It was time to leave. A conversation with a sympathetic neighbor (the one who gave me the heads up about the whole "those people" conversation) revealed three more bullet points in the "Get Me The Fuck Out of Here" field manual:

First, when asked about a cockroach problem (not to mention the silverfish and centipedes), our landlord refused to arrange for an exterminator, saying "Oh those are no big deal."
Second, a recent incident with a neighbor's CO2 alarm revealed that all our vents are fake. They don't actually vent anywhere. So when we cook or shower, carbon monoxide and shampooey steam just blow around within the aparmtent. Staying would mean months of ceiling drilling and construction.
Third, the roof is cracking.

And so another chapter closes. Perhaps it was foolhardy to imagine I'd be allowed to fill a room with my all stuff and stay there for more than a year. But it appears I'm just not destined for normalcy.

Trouble is, Peter is leaving for France on Thursday. I get to do this all by myself, with a hostile and stupid landlord breathing down my neck. Times like these, a girl sure could use some back up—in the form of beefy Italian boys in muscle Ts who could help me cart and carry, and who would say things like 'ma'am' and "Don't talk that way to a lady, buddy, or I'll break your legs."

me and whose army, part one: the uppance cometh

2010-07-17T01:13:00.006-04:00

In which our heroine hires a beagle named Champ to ruin her day.

Nutshell: bed bugs.

Translation: life as we know it has come to a crashing end.

After forty five minutes of sobbing, I spent the afternoon sealing textiles in plastic, packing my refugee bag, lugging said bag to exile in Manhattan, then laudering and disinfecting the contents.

Now it is nigh on two am and I find myself alone on a sofa in the Ivory Tower, cursing the gods. My apartment—sorry, Peter, our apartment—was pristine. I did everything right. I dusted, I swept, I mopped. I kept up with clutter. I disinfected with certified organic nontoxic substances. And the little fuckers marched right through the front door and set up camp anyway, laughing their insect heina laughter at my hubris.

(Oh, yeah, and they bit my feet, too.)

The inspector was very kind. He smiled, I signed on the dotted line. He told me not to panic. But he also warned me not to cough up the 1500 bucks it will cost to debugify if my sorry ass landlord won't treat the building itself. Because, you see, the source is somewhere in the walls, where nothing short of a nuclear event will stop them from coming back.

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming. After all, this is the very landlord who couldn't get the heat sorted out until March, the one who had the balls to charge full rent all winter because, hell, he offered us a cinderblock space heater and a hotplate, didn't he?

There's a cheeky bit of irony here. Remember all those months I spent longing for sanctuary, for a place to call my own? I planted my tubers. They miscarried. Maybe I was never meant to lay down roots. The nomad wind has shifted, and I sink or swim by my ability to let it—all of it—go.

My acrimoniously divorced parents rarely agree on anything. But the transtextual telephone family triangle has united on this one front: We know a sign when one slaps us upside the head.

vertigo, part one

2010-07-13T23:21:00.006-04:00

I'm not sure what the stages of quarter life crisis are, you know, officially, but I picture them looping like bike paths, forming something like a Venn Diagram, and covering everything from acting out to outright despair. I am somewhere in the middle, drifting.

You see, I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. Or, at the very least, what I want to do while I do it. The trouble is, I am—as ever—ill-prepared.

Sure, my B.A. will make me look good. My GPA, once dusted for cobwebs, ought to leverage me a little. But then there are mountains to scale, the first of which being my aversion to calling myself a writer. Best clear that hurdle first. Because, after all, it is not my place to decide I don't have talent. That is why MFA programs have admissions committees. So. Yeah.

I have four months to choose a genre, write forty pages of admit-worthy material, develop a profound sense of self-discipline, spend a lot of money I don't have, mail a bunch of applications and . . . relearn algebra (that last one is giving me nightmares).

Then there are leaps to be taken, from death-defying heights. This is the part where, come September, I quit my hideous soul-snapper of a job in spectacular fashion, sublet the turret and move to Florida until my applications are mailed, sipping mojitos on the Intracoastal with my mother and (gasp) re-donning the apron of my youth. Once a waitress, always a waitress. Only this time, the job whispers to me of dizzying freedom and dignity in the form of cold, hard cash. I can answer to pigs, it's the She Beast who's got me down.

Thing is, I'm thrilled. This may be the greatest, most daring—most selfish—coup I've ever attempted. Hence, the vertigo. So I breathe. I squirm. I inhabit the liminal quagmire between decision and execution. And I try like hell to shut my ears against the persistent chorus muttering in my head, saying fool, calling wolf, calling "theatre!" in a crowded fire.

on being of childbearing age

2010-07-08T10:26:00.004-04:00

I've made it abundantly clear that I would like to have babies. Or, you know, a baby (singular). Someday. You know, before my ovaries pickle.

Peter Pan does not. Did not. Will not. This was the last ice cube to be Jenga-ed out of the igloo of our love.

I've seen the way he looks at infants in restaurants, at his de facto goddaughter, even at his own nephews on occasion. One squeal or whine, and a rage sprouts up in his eyes, a blind and impotent hatred coupled with the complete bafflement of someone who looks at a family and says, "Why, God, why?"

The day I stopped willing him to soften was the day I called 'time of death'. I looked at him, felt a stab of sadness not unlike pity, and said, "I'm won't try to change you, but you've got to let me go." And, since then, since our pile of ice chunks fell apart, we've never been closer.

Now I can laugh at it, watch him squirm in the face of delighted toddler laughter, watch his face fill with dread at the thought of spending more than five minutes in a closed environment with anyone under the age of twelve. We made the right call. And we're better friends for it.

He looks at me, staring wistfully at chubby feet in BABYBJORNs, and just shakes his head.

New York magazine hit the stands this week with the cover "I love my children. I hate my life" and featured an article describing parenting as All Joy and No Fun. The playboys of the social media sphere are posting and reposting this as an everlasting affirmation of their bachelorism-as-life-choice. It's their red badge of proof.

See?! Sociopsychological science proves it true! People who have children are miserable!

Right. Sure. We no longer need to breed kids for hard labor. The modern world has made it elective. But come on. I'm just getting used to the ugly truth that marriage is an antiquated institution for catlady schoolteachers such as myself. You expect me to also relinquish the dream of porch swings and prom night primpings?

I spent some time this weekend in the company of a nuclear family that would put the Kennedys to shame. The original homestead has spread to three houses whose yards converge to form a sort of compound where children and grand children and—ohmygosh, great grandchildren—wander freely, covered in grass stains and Freezer Pop residue. That, my friends, is the point.

If you read that article carefully, you will find the following quote buried on page six:

“Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?”

There's the rub. And the fundamental difference between those of us who do and don't want kids. Me? I look forward to the day I take a backseat for what the article called the "nineteen-year grind" of parenting. (Though I'm sure my mother will relish the inevitable I-told-you-sos.) And, while I harbor no judgment for those who'd prefer to stay up front and joyriding til they're struck down by dementia and hemorrhoids, I look at Peter (looking at his nephews as if he'll burst with love) and I just shake my head.

my geriatric weekend

2010-07-07T15:38:00.005-04:00

I spent the Fourth of July on an alien planet of total relaxation. Eat, sleep, read. Repeat.

Morning coffee, the New York Times and berries on the porch overlooking the river, afternoons by the pool, farm stand suppers, evening ice cream cones, old movies, and long nights reading in bed as the midgies and moths hurled themselves at the window screens.

I slept more in two nights than in the previous two weeks combined. I also saw family I hadn't seen in decades, which was nice for continuity's sake and a connection to something other than the three-man caravan of my nomadic childhood. But mostly I just shut my mouth and slowed my brain, retreating into a sort of monk-like quiet and turning the Rubik's cube by cube.

Monday it was back on the road and back to business as usual. I hit the ground running in a city besieged by an ungodly heat wave: book shopping, milkshakes in Madison Square park and dancing, oh, dancing. Now here it is Wednesday-that-feels-like-Tuesday, and I'm back to square zero on the Sleep Dep scale, cursing the life choices that bring me to this Soviet-era gulag every day between the hours of 9 and 5.

But I met a boy. Or—should I say—a boy I already knew (but not well) took a bit of an interest. Contrary to established tradition, I'm withholding analysis for future developments. For now, it was nice. That's all I'm gonna say.

the days can't be like the nights

2010-07-01T10:38:00.004-04:00

After tango night, Midsummer Nights Swing, Lincoln Center.

there's gonna be a revolution

2010-06-30T12:31:00.000-04:00

New York has become a much harder place of late.

More sad than scary really, but not easy to miss. The warmer air is sharp with stale sweat and the smell of the rank unwashed. Grocery carts laden with covered mounds and bubbled plastic bags are pushed up against buildings everywhere. Men, women and dogs stretch out over vents on every side street and thoroughfare, covered in cardboard.

Subway stations after 10pm have become convention centers for the ruined, hunched to sleep on benches, piles and carts beside them, swollen ankles, swollen feet bulging out of wasted shoes. There is no overlooking this underworld, no passing through from dance hall to overpriced apartment. It has become too pathetic, too prevalent, to ignore.

Even my neighborhood has its share, the sidewalk full of sad, sad drunks outside the OTB, shouting their pain from milk crate couches. And the lone man, long-haired and dignified, who washes his feet every morning with a bottle of Poland Spring. He has wild eyes and a gentle gait, and I would totally crouch beside his mailboxes for a sandwich and a story if it weren't for my paranoia of connecting to drifters who watch me come off the subway most nights at 2am and could very easily trail me home.

I work for a non-profit—run by middle-minded management jerks and wannabe bureaucrats—but the mission is a solid one. Rehabilitate the recovering homeless. Help them get and keep a job. Stay in touch as long as they do to negotiate lay-offs and relapses and, well, share the journey. Parts of my job inspire me daily, as dysfunctional and toxic an office environment as it has proven to be.

One of my superiors has been known to say that, particularly in this city, most of us are just a paycheck or two away. One ill-timed bender, one maladjustment made to the anti-depressants, one bad break too many, and how close do we come? I, for one, live paycheck to paycheck, and if it weren't for some solid support and a few lucky breaks, I'd be up a creek myself.

A lot of factors contribute to the cycle of homelessness: incarceration, lack of education or opportunity, mental illness, addiction . . . And watching this particular economic tailspin take its toll is getting harder and harder to watch.

That said, how easily and often do I hide in my book on the train as person after person sings, shouts, recites the standard N train speeches to fill their hat full of change. I avert my eyes because I find it overwhelming, each day sadder than the next. But if I gave the dollar I used to (without fail, feeling guilty if I ran out of cash), I'd be out a sandwich and a coffee by the time I got home from work. I've been saturated, made callous by a city of abuse. I can care all I want, but suddenly I'm overwhelmed by how little I can do. Programs like mine are out there, but how many people never make it that far? How many crazies slip through the cracks? And who's to blame? I find myself continually balancing compassion and contempt, and hating myself for it. Because—bottom line—there is a threshold of heartbreak and this place sacrifices your best instincts in the name of survival.

But it is hard. There's something unsafe happening, like a pasta pot with the lid on. Sooner or later, something starchy and hot is going to come boiling out and burning down the sides. Too many people are having too hard a time. Plus, it smells. The whole city smells. Bus exhaust and summer sewage are bad enough without exploring the spectrum of human stenches.

And then the drunks. The ones so drunk, so used to being drunk, they hardly notice their own shouting.

It feels like danger. Like Oran when all the rats start dying. A city poised on the knife blade between melting pot and mayhem.

more than enough

2010-06-27T06:15:00.008-04:00

Yesterday was one of those truly perfect New York days. HCB at the MoMa, lunch roseé, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public, stracciatella pizza, champagne and fondue at the Bourgeois Pig, then three humid hours of dancing in a bedazzled basement. With all those chandeliers, I half expected someone to start playing the voice over from the Haunted Mansion. "There are no windows . . . and no doors . . ."

Of course, I had to watch the G.I.Q. sulk in a corner all night in a tasteless shirt with some leggy blonde, but there are worse things to cope with—who wants his attention without the sweater vest anyway? Summer comes and Mr. Wet Wool and Book Smell is just another clammy man in khaki.

I danced and it was wonderful.

One by one, other tangueros paired off with other leggy blondes and left the station for beds in outer boroughs while I got passed back and forth between the Champion and the Tall Guy, who caught me with one strap dangling and actually reattached my shoe for a second tanda. We were all but chased out of the milonga by the cleaning crew.

Good nights are what we make of them and I ended this one staying out til nearly six making diner conversation with new friends. I rattled home in a minivan handicab in the luge lane on the verymost vertigo edge of the bridge, just as the weekend world was getting ready for work.

Off to dance some more.

who knew summer came in color?

2010-06-23T11:35:00.006-04:00

Goodness. I hardly know what to say.

It appears the lovely Phoenix has given me my very first blogger award. I shudder involuntarily at having even typed that word, but c'est la guerre, non? When in Rome. Nomenclature be damned, I am honored to be included among people who brighten or have once brightened her day, though I can't imagine how she managed to find any sunshine round here lately. I was actually tempted to post this thing in black and white (because dear god, that thing is colorful), but then I caught myself. We could all use a little sunshine and I, for one, endeavor to let that little light shine right out of my lily-white Irish (oh wait, why am I talking about my butt two posts in a row?) . . .

Apparently these awards are like a mate gourd, meant to be passed along. And so, without further ado, I bequeath the Res Ipsa Loquitur "ray of sunshine" award to my favorite day brightening (ugh) . . . blogger.

Kathleen, this is for you. Ladies and gentlemen, this woman is a diamond in the mommy blogs. So please, enjoy her shiny green layout, her darling boys, and her insightful take on the trials of wifery and motherhood in rural New Hampshire. She can also help you clean up yer act because, in between raising three children, she enjoys doing thorough environmentalist research so the rest of us plebes don't have to.

And for honorable mention, Jane of the Virgin Diaries. Because mama tells the truth.

front sky

2010-06-22T11:39:00.005-04:00

Woke up this morning with a sore throat. But, you know, it's a sore throat. Hardly a tragedy. Certainly I am capable of getting through today in my desk chair. No one else cares how much it hurts to swallow—or that I'm rolling with the raspy whisper of a supervillain in the first round of her death throes. Anyway, I pulled up my big girl pants, juiced myself a vitamin cocktail with a butt-ton of ginger, grabbed a box of Throat Comfort and commuted.

First thing, my boss comes into my cubby—face contorted into all sorts of snotty—and says,

"What is WRONG with you? I feel like you're always getting sick. Clearly you need to start taking better care of yourself."

Okay, She-Beast.

First of all, aside from a run-in with some unfortunate felafel, my last sick day was in January.

Second of all, I juice kale for breakfast every morning.

So you can kiss my lily-white Irish you know what.

in flora veritas

2010-06-18T12:13:00.004-04:00

Who needs the male half of the species when your best friend sends you stealth flowers at the office?

one thing I'll say for me

2010-06-16T23:57:00.008-04:00

I take my licks standing up.

Last night was Non-Date: The Ultimate Showdown. And it ended just as poorly as anticipated.

You see, this man has been hovering around my heart for eight years now. Four years of student/teacher friendship followed by three years of fervid non-dating, and then this past stretch of maybes and what-ifs and occasional grandma kisses in Grand Central Station. It has been one long rinse cycle of ambiguity, but here we are, in the year of our lord 2010, and finally I've come out the other side. A bit bedraggled for the wear, but squeaky clean.

Six months ago, if a man had said to me, "No, I never felt that way"—even if I knew this to be false—I would have sunk to my knees in despair. Because that man, in reconstructing his own narrative, would have robbed me of mine. I have waited the better part of a decade for this absolution. To know, once and finally, what I mean to this man. I wanted to hear him admit it, to say, "Yes, of course I felt it too, but I'm emotionally retarded." Needless to say, he did not. But then I realized: I didn't need to hear him say what I already knew—at ligament level—to be true.

At least he said something. (Granted, I all but forced him to, but who's counting?) He looked me straight in the eyes and he lied.

"And that's the ballgame," I said. And trotted off to the subway, because mama's got class.

The real plot twist here was not in his refusal, but my reaction. Sure, frustration and self-pity flashed in my brain pan; I was ready, Kleenex in hand, to eulogize all the missed moments and wasted opportunity, but it didn't take me much further than the turnstile to recognize another feeling strongarming the others for a clear shot at the spotlight, which is to say: relief. I was relieved.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, will get me past whatever wisps of regret and wounded pride will threaten to settle overhead. I am finally free of this albatross. The Universe gave me one clear moment in which to say, "Well, I've had enough of this crap."

By the time I got home, I was ten pounds taller. How many hours of my life have I wasted trying to decipher his feelings? Post-date analyses, passive aggressive emails, wistful texts fallen on deaf ears . . . all of that is over. Chapter closed.

If he had said "yes" and swept me off my feet right there on 42nd Street, I would have been settling for just a little less. These children (all pushing forty—jeez, ma, will I never learn?!) will never love you back because they've got nothing to give.

And I would rather be alone than accept another incomplete person in my heart. I deserve more.

Surprisingly, the bright side of yesterday won out. There were two hours of sunset dancing on the blustery and humid pier, a perfect pint of Guinness in a newly discovered pub, and a big fat peace descending as I snuggled into my single girl bed.

Functional.

for a piece of silver lining

2010-06-16T07:14:00.001-04:00

In Syracuse this weekend, for the encore tour of our cabaret . . . such as it was.

Surreal apocalypse Americana is as good a place as any to take a step off the hamster wheel. We had midnight BBQ with a bunch of bikers, gawked at the prices of candy and cigarettes, and performed in a theatre not twenty yards from a giant pro-life billboard. On a street corner that would later boast a catfight between a bunch of hysterical preteen bitches and one very ill-prepared minivan cabbie. So that was exciting.

We played to sold-out crowds both nights, which would have been a major boon for morale had not our pipsqueak small-minded manchild of a director taken it upon himself to give me a "note" five minutes after we closed. About my lack of coming timing.

Now this vain little queen knows really nothing about theatre. He delights, however, in the spotlight. In the time it took to get through cue-to-cue, we could have teched all five acts of Hamlet. But no. He wanted to sit there with his headset and clip light, snapping his stubby fingers at us and assigning specials at varying intensities to the silk flower display on the piano. He'd chirp, "Freeeeeze!" when a simple "hold" would have done. And, during the run, he'd breeze through the theatre reeking of skunk weed, claiming credit for writing and "devising" a show which had been a collaborative effort (until he booby-checked his way into the equation). His pedantic low-blow of a parting gift was, I'm sure, a nod to the original tiff we had last month, when he more or less told me I had no stage presence.

Once again, I am the kid who runs right up and wallops her face against the sliding glass, mistaking it for an open door. Show business is a confidence game and I'll always be the lost little girl with popsicle stained fingers rubbing her goose egg and staring dreamily through the panes. Unless I pull my head out of my lily white Irish arse—but quick.

Marian Seldes said, "I am not afraid on the stage. I am afraid in life." And the dame knows her stuff. Sometimes I find it so hard to reconcile my lack of ambition with the high of being onstage, the umbilical tether to an appreciative crowd, the loss of all fear under lights. I know how to read an audience. No one gets to make me doubt that. Not anymore. And certainly not this particular pea-brained jerk-off. I'm just plain smarter than he is—and he knows it.

Despite that swift kick to the girl nads, it was an honor to be up there with two such dazzlingly talented women and our red-hot pianist/musical director. This gig got easier and more enjoyable every time (once I tuned out the reptile and actually performed). I found myself increasingly less terrified of using a microphone and, you know, singing in front of people in general.

And the omnipresent loneliness? I made a good showing up there, I did. I would have thought I was done for with that first final click of the hotel room lock, but then I unpacked, rearranged all the miniature shampoo bottles on the bathroom counter, and savored that good old hotel-grade anonymity and 'alone.' There, behind paper thin walls and an industrial deadbolt, you can be anyone. The charade and the fantasy are yours to construct.

Inevitably, I settled on myself. This was my first hotel room as a single adult. The lady minus a plus one. The woman who sleeps alone. And I found it comforting. I found myself comforted by the chlorinated clean of bath towels neatly folded, the vacuum swatch of stain repelling carpet, the hum of the wall unit AC, the ceiling unit bathroom vent, the ice machine down the hall. Even the sounds of other toilets flushing, other doors clicking open and slamming shut, the ghost elevator to the lobby—these noises are the texture of travel and I come to love them. Even when my favorite gays go to their room down the hall and I am left to the quiet.

Girl's just gotta learn to make her own noise is all . . .

in which a theory is tested

2010-06-10T09:52:00.005-04:00

Yesterday was a day that threatened to crush me like a tomato. Recovering from a lame duck date and a three day stretch of overexertion and undersleep, work was just about as excruciating as one would expect—and then it rained.*

But now that I have cultivated the solidarity in my own solitude—in the form of sauteéing garlic and pasta sauce—solace is easily found. I walked home in the rain, with a can of San Marzano tomatos and some spaghettini, and exactly an hour later Peter and I were stuffing our faces (in a rare moment of civilized dining at the kitchen table), sopping it up with crusty ass garlic bread.

It appears I've become one of those people who uses the kitchen as a supplement to therapy. This is convenient, as I have always been one of those people who eats her feelings.

Anyway, later, as I was drifting to sleep, the rain quiet and Queensie outside my window, I thought, "I've run out of boys" (not that I was in any way trying to accumulate them). Nevertheless, with the last death rattles of the Cinematographer, the list has officially been exhausted. I found myself wholly relieved—at peace even.

Literally ten seconds later, I got a text from the Foodie. Remember him? Sign from the universe or test from Satan?

I'm going with test from Satan.

*See here for further impressions of precipitation in New York City.

five for the fellas

2010-06-09T09:49:00.005-04:00

A few points of honor:

1. Never show up for a dinner date and lamely remark that you aren't hungry.

2. If you earn drastically more than your companion (and spend the better part of the evening expounding on the success of your business), even a half-hearted offer to subsidize her meal is appreciated. If she's worth her salt, she'll still pay her own way, but your lack of chivalry is deafening.

3. If you are pushing forty and have yet to be married, there's probably something wrong with you. (Thanks, Mum. Should have listened the first twelve times you said it!)

4. You may find yourself infinitely fascinating, but your narcissism can hardly be relied upon to bridge conversational gaps. Similarly, chuckling at your own anecdotes before you can choke out a punch line is . . . well, that should go without saying.

5. Gesturing like a velociraptor does nothing for your already suspect masculinity quotient.

And one for the ladies: when you go out for tapas, go with each other. You'll get much more mileage out of that gin and lavender sangría and you'll never have to hand back your dessert menu leaving the churros con chocolate unordered.

it would take an acrobat

2010-06-07T09:34:00.007-04:00

In which our heroine cuts loose a little. Seriously, made-my-mama-proud kind of cut loose.

Stayed out until five am on Friday night, tagging along with a posse of lifelong friends who kept me up with margaritas and music and impromptu debates about the Universe. Dawn was just starting to seep under the door frames of my neighborhood when my overpriced car from Brooklyn finally delivered me home.

Saturday I slept til one, made myself an epic egg salad sandwich with fresh dill and cornichons and watched The West Wing on my couch until it was time to stroll through the park on my way to a movie with . . . (and I'm almost ashamed to admit this) the G.I.Q. Now, before you all start ranting and raving and pushing the panic button, I'll say this: it was not a date. I repeat: not a date. Also, I have no intention of reopening that can of worms. I'm not stupid.

Truth is, he's lovely. And erudite. And I've never met anyone like him for talking literature. On some screwy level, we get each other. (This is the man who read me E.B. White essays in bed.) So I caved. We saw an old movie, had a slice at Joe's, then he walked me to my train and we parted ways. Drama free zone.

As a gesture of our germinating friendship, I gave back the Bukowski. The beautiful Black Sparrow Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. Now, here's the kicker: In the thick of the trauma, the stomach sickening aftermath of "us" (if such a thing there ever was), I wrote him a letter—a letter I never intended to send, one of those exercises in woman-scorned catharsis. Not thinking, I stashed that letter in the aforementioned book to properly isolate all mementos of him in one pernicious corner of my bedroom. It was only when he began flipping through the pages on the street corner that I realized my flub. There it was, compactly folded and tucked neatly into the spine.

"Is this for me?"

Ah well. Perhaps subconsciously (or consciously) I've come to a place . . . and in that place I no longer care if people know how I feel about them. In lurid and humiliating detail. In florid, unapologetic prose. If he's got any redeeming quality, he'll do the old smile and file and we can move on as bigger people and better adults.

Let's just put it this way: I've never met anyone who would offer to leave me voice messages full of Melville—even after an ugly break up. Until I determine he is not worth having around, I am strong enough to quell the revving engines in my underpants and be his friend. Lord knows he probably needs one.

That said, I did just hand the man a letter that included a line that went a little like this: "You took a woman made frigid by Pavlov and turned her on . . . awakened appetites in me that will long prowl the alleys we leave behind us, hot on your scent as it sours and fades." I am, therefore, a little worried. My life did, I'll admit, flash before my eyes on that corner of Broadway and Prince, but I pulled myself together, we parted cordially, and that was that.

I got through a Sunday as busy as a conveyor belt without thinking twice. A great stretch of rehearsal bookended by lovely brunch and lovely dinner with people worth caring about. Leap and live, they say. And keep on living.

Rather unwisely (yet not altogether unpredictably), I ended up dancing. I had one of those epic whirlwind nights of tango that, though they may deprive you of a REM cycle or two, give you wings.