pieces

There was some kind of pulsing addiction to this new place I called home. I think I loved the pieces of it. I loved the unpredictable degrees of strangeness that the city wholeheartedly embraced. There was so much variety in just one pocket, there were vintage shops and there was bold pink hair and these big beautiful trees that cast shapes of shade in the park that had no children. There were old brick buildings and hues of the sky that I had never seen before, there was live music and there were colors and feelings that I knew were the living veins to the heart of it all. It was no surprise that I also loved the pieces of my life that were specifically mine to own, mine to adore, mine to carry. I loved my clean bedroom and I loved my cluttered choices, and I loved that in the lost chaos there were people I had found. I loved that when I drove to work, I could see the mountains. I loved that here, in this city, I wanted to understand the art exhibition with all of the confusing paintings, because I loved that the learning curve was so steep, that the snow was so cold, that the air was so thin. There was a moment recently where I was overcome with a feeling of belonging and I smiled at a baby girl sitting on her father’s shoulders. She smiled back at me in this knowing way and I was surprised that she did because I thought she was too young to understand or return my gesture, but she understood and returned it, and in that moment I thought that perhaps I loved this new place so much because this new place had loved me back. More than anything I loved that when the frozen river finally melted and it was warm enough to ride your bike, I was on my own in this city where the mountains sit behind it, and at home. 

the house

I was thinking hard as we walked up the creaky stairs. The oak floors and the white trim combined with the startling vacancy of the house made me feel like I was walking into the scene of a movie, like this empty house was my stage, like the windows and the walls and the rooms without any furniture were waiting for me to do something, anything, to make it movie-worthy.

At the top of the stairs, we parted ways. He in the first room, me in the second. He was handsome, which was my favorite thing about him, because it’s nice to have a handsome man who you aren’t actually attracted to around. Handsome men offer things that less handsome men simply don’t have; they have lying eyes and magenta lips and five-o-clock shadows to die for, all of which you find yourself entirely indifferent to, all of which make you feel, in some odd, twisted, accidental kind of way, more powerful. There is something to be said about resisting the aesthetic charms they know they have in their arsenal. I felt like if the house could talk, it would agree with me. It was an agreeable kind of house.

I walked into the third empty room with the big windows. There was peacefulness in this room. I wondered if it was the very visual and overwhelming unsettledness, the blatant, intangible amount of emptiness that demands this centered sense of self from within when you least expect it. No bed, no table, no books, no clothes, no life.

Just you. 

wednesday

But we’re all friends here, I thought. Are we not all friends here?

There is timelessness in our capacity as human beings to give love but there is also timelessness in our capacity as human beings to inflict hurt. 

It’s Wednesday and the rust inside the left corner of the white sink won’t come out but I’m scrubbing the orange brown stubbornness because that’s all that’s left and the dog is crying, it’s too hot in here, I’m tired and my eyes are thinking and my body is small.

I thought we were all friends here.

If only I had known we’d go on to ravage one another in the savage, unpredictable way that only human beings can.

It won’t go away; I keep scrubbing.

But we’re all friends here, I thought.

Are we not all

friends

here? 

natalia

She struck me as the kind of person who took lots of weekend trips to San Francisco or Los Angeles and had friends named Kat and Ainsley and Logan. She was an open, easy book with no need to hide, with nobody to hide from, and in the few minutes that I sat with her she seemed to experience joy, sadness, and empathy all at once. She was small and seemed nice and lighthearted, in no way did she seem disingenuous, but something about her purposeful charm made me feel like she knew I wasn’t convinced, like she knew I needed some convincing. I’ll admit that I had a hard time believing there was anything too introspective or intuitive going on internally because she seemed wholly unconcerned with anything other than having a great time and trying to get at the very pulsing center of it. She liked the spotlight, she was seemingly quite confident, which had to mean she wasn't a thinker, not an observer – she couldn’t be; she was not like me. I hang back, I blend in, I'm quiet and I listen and read and connect with others in a telepathic way almost completely opposite from the way that she was connecting with me now. I stopped looking at her face. I didn't like her eyes or her name with three syllables. “You don’t like me, do you,” she asked with a teasing smile after the waiter brought our check. I hated her for that. “I do like you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t believe that you’re a writer.” 

Intro

It was 7:20 a.m. I thought about the difference between twenty years and twenty minutes. 

So much can change in twenty years. You might get divorced in twenty years or have a baby, you could be dead in twenty years or maybe in twenty years you’ll live in Australia.

But. You could find your husband whispering on the phone in twenty minutes, you could deliver a tiny, crying brown-eyed thing of wonder in twenty minutes, your once-functioning brain could lose oxygen beyond the point of return in twenty minutes, or in twenty minutes you could buy a one-way airplane ticket on the Internet.

I decided that there was no difference between twenty years and twenty minutes, and then I got dressed and went to work.

from now

I thought about what I would think ten or twenty years from now. I would probably think that my young life had been lovely. I would probably remember the giant wine glasses and the white roses, the blonde wood floors and the high crown molding and the Victorian windows without any curtains. I would remember the leaky shower and the coupons for Thai food and the writing, the reading, and the drinking. I would remember the dog and the washing machine. Why did it take so long for our clothes to wash? I would remember that. I would remember the organized clutter, all of the lost socks and old cook books and mismatched pairs of gloves, and the heavy spells of uncertainty. Surely I would remember the uncertainty. I would remember the solitude on nights when the snow would fall and the lights were low, when the blue night and the white everything were married in perfect unison together underneath the bright moon’s ever-approving eye. I would remember the quiet.

I would remember how I came to love the quiet. 

optimism

She was impenetrable, like she had a shell of warm, golden goodness around her at all times. She felt it enveloping her, felt like she saw negativity in the form of missiles come straight towards her while she was at the bank or walking somewhere, and she would duck or run away because while she was good she wasn't fearless and the evils would always find her, yet for some extraordinary reason each time they came close to striking her they were thrown back by this kind of unexplainable force or vortex that surrounded her like a shield; she watched it happen time and time again, just as awed by this baffling phenomenon as the next person, and so she inevitably wondered if in the same way that sad people had more sad cells than happy cells or in the same way that bad people had more bad cells than good cells, if there was such a thing as happy people having too many happy cells?

Was it possible to be tragically optimistic?