anytime

It’s early in the morning. We are driving somewhere. Father-daughter bliss, the way it was always supposed to be.

Ain’t no sunshine when she goes.

You know I love this song, you say. You look happy but feel sad when you say it.

I wonder about the time so many years ago when you were late picking me up from school. You are never late. I held hands with the principal and cried while I watched the boys throw rocks into the creek. I didn’t even know we had a creek, until then. When did we get a creek? I asked. Just a few more minutes, she said. He’ll be here soon.

You pulled up and my heart exploded in my chest. She was worried, she said with an embarrassed smile, like I was her kid.

“That’s my dad,” I said, looking her square in the eyes. "That's my dad." 

She smiled again, and so did you. Yours was different.

You held my hand as we walked to the car. I won't be late again, you said. I won't let you down again.

And you haven’t.

I wonder though, so many years later on this early morning when we are driving somewhere:

Have I?

And this house just ain’t no home, anytime she goes away.

look

 

I stopped thinking about specifically who and what I wanted for my life and just started thinking about what I hoped it would look like. There was this woman holding a glass of white wine at a networking thing. The space was neat and industrial – exposed brick, polished concrete floors, slick steel finishes, exposed beams. Anyway the five-o-clock sun came through and hit her glass at an angle so that the white wine looked more like a bunch of diamonds had melted into a big, liquidy puddle in her glass, and I thought that I needed to be drinking a glass of what looks like melted diamonds right before the sun sets in some thoughtful, inspiring place, maybe Europe, soon. I thought about the tiles on the wall in my future kitchen. What would the tiles look like? Maybe a backsplash made up of small black and white octagonal tiles would be really nice. Maybe I would have a big window right above the sink where I could watch someone I love reading a book I wrote in the backyard. After that I would go pick up some flowers or get coffee or do something that always looks really artsy on all of the blogs I follow but actually just makes me feel lonely, like read in bed or put on an expensive sweater, but maybe then, after my time in Europe and my black and white kitchen and my somebody reading a book I wrote, all of the things that make me feel lonely won’t, anymore.

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.