further reading

The last time I saw Paris (an accidental essay)

new digs, new dos

Now see here.

in which our heroine

...moved elsewhere.

(Consider this my forwarding address.)

With all best wishes,
Gabby Fox*

state of the union

(sparing you the minutia of the MFA, which has consumed my life, my time, and most my words...)

I’m moving in with Jack.

At least until the summer. And then at least until the fall. (Who knows about next year.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now: I almost cannot care about the endpoint. Every day I’m with him I’m a better woman.

And it’s not just him. I am two years shy of thirty, living in the only city in the continental United States with fangs. I have negative money—a dark and forking fault of debt just beneath my city walls. I’m still (fifteen months later) living out of what I salvaged from the wreckage of adult life: two bags of clothes, some books, a laptop and a massing stack of New Yorkers I’ll one day have time again to read. I have never been happier.

I’ve made uncertainty a way of life, performance poetry. I’m never sure how I will pay those mounting grad school bills, or where I’ll live. Or what I’ll eat. Or if my body will survive me.

But there is plenty that I do know (now with utmost certainty):

I am a writer. I can spend whole days just me and blinking cursor and admit to this out loud. When I read, I feel the ground beneath me. When I dance, I feel it leave. A humble meal made of courgettes and bendy carrots, cooked with someone who loves you, is finer than the finest five course menu in the world. You want the guy who pours the mueslix in the pasta water. I’m stronger than I thought I was. And mortal. I will go anywhere whenever asked, but I’m afraid to fly.

So, let me make these choices, Universe. They are the right ones. Protect me as I do.

Protect me as I trade the overpriced apartment with the elephants (and their subwoofer) upstairs for something rougher at the seams. The place that smells like fried chicken and has a tiny cockroach infestation (the cockroaches being tiny, not the infestation) for the place that smells like dusty books and frying chicken breasts (there lives four boys, and all of them philosophers). My home will be where Jack is: a carpeted, crumble-ceilinged den of books and papers scattered. Book tables holding empty cups of tea. Scattered tango shoes and underpants. Wooly jumpers on a thrift-store chair.

We spent a night apart last night (soon to be commodity). I asked if he was having doubts.

Quite the contrary, he said. I’m tidying some space for you. No second thoughts.

the twenty seven year old second start

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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.