girl across the way

Dear Girl Across the Way, 

 As you are aware, our apartments face one another. I look out my window and I can see you carefully hanging your delicates on the clothesline in your living room, waiting for them to dry from the wash while the sun casts long, commanding shadows on your light blue wall. Alternatively, this means you can see that at dinnertime, I am still in my mismatched pink pajamas and messy bun, staring at the sunset like it’s fraudulent, its very existence pointless, the significance of a day undermined entirely and unjustly by a forever-changed life as we know it. 

 Normally I would never notice these intimate and intricate details of you or your life, but since neither one of us have left our apartments for the better part of two months, I am acutely aware of how you operate within the confines of your home. I know that at dinner you will sit cross-legged on the couch, biting your nails and impatiently staring at your computer, and I wonder what you are waiting for. I know that when you unload the dishwasher, you start with the utensils first, usually on the phone with someone who makes you talk with your hands and laugh with your head thrown back. And I know that when the sun goes down, the TV doesn’t come on and nobody comes over before you turn out the lights and fall peacefully asleep. 

Strange as all of this is, I am comforted in knowing that you can see me too. When I catch you looking at me it feels like you’re exercising terms of an agreement we both had no choice but to come to. I like that we have found our groove in this regard, two women around the same age, living in solitude but also in close proximity to one another with the general knowledge and understanding that if we want to have any natural light throughout the day, the private details of our respective lives will be exposed like see-through glass in a fishbowl. Nobody comes over to my place before bed either, but you already knew that. At this point, we might as well be goldfish. 

I saw you watching me pace around my apartment on Wednesday morning as I peered into the abyss of a potential anxiety attack. I saw it coming because I shattered my plate while trying to make pancakes that I didn’t end up eating, my blood sugar low and hands shaky. I tried to remember why I might be feeling this way, but nothing came to mind other than the thought that perhaps I might not be real, that none of this was. When the anxiety finally passed and I could take a full breath again, I cried. It felt so good to cry like that. I thought about pulling the curtains closed, my head spinning and my body feeling extra small and weak, but in the end, I was too upset to care that you could see me. This is how my Wednesday is going, I wanted to say to someone, but nobody was asking. 

A few weeks ago you may have noticed I went out for a couple hours. I was at my friend’s house for dinner. They’re in their fifties and the whole time I felt so yucky, like a bank-robber about to steal the most valuable thing they have – their health. They wanted to play dominoes but I didn’t want to touch too much, and when I said that, they laughed and said that there are some people you are just willing to take a chance for. A little while later their daughter called and they didn’t mention that I was over, the omission strategic and clearly pre-meditated between the two of them. I left swiftly and quietly, and haven’t been able to answer their phone calls since. Twice they’ve texted to ask if they did anything wrong. No, I keep saying…I did. 

Do you miss having someone hug you? I do. I miss someone telling me to pass the salt or ask me how work was. I miss sitting at my favorite restaurant bar, eating alone, but with others. Sometimes when I go for a walk and people look at me, then I know for sure I am real. I must still exist because they are looking at me. 

On my worst days, I wonder if I choked on something and died, here in Unit Six on 52nd Street, who would know? Without anywhere to be, what flags would be raised? I hope that you would be the one to figure out that something was wrong. I know you’d know by the second day. On days when I see that your curtains are still closed at noon, I ask myself if you are okay. Usually you like them open. I hope that you are surviving, and I am always relieved when I glance over there a few hours later and the curtains have parted like the sea, confirming that you are in there, alive and well enough to open them up to the day and its gift of forgiving sunshine.

I see that you have big framed pictures on your wall, but I can’t tell what they are of exactly. I know you adjust them now and again, looking at them carefully and with intention. Do you miss the people in those photos? I think about how much has changed in a short amount of time. We should have told those squirmy kids in class, not much longer. The grumpy business travelers, this will be your last one in a while. Our grandparents in Church. Our friends in-person. Our parents, in our lives, arms around each other with some memorable place in the background, posing together for a photograph. This will be your last one in a while. 

I read an article recently that said that a silver lining in all of this may be the birth of a new awareness regarding the importance and power of human connection. It talked about the depths of sadness and emptiness that society will be forced to navigate in this new world, one void of touch and the tangible, replaced by visual and virtual. By design we will crave what we took for granted, forever remembering this period of time, and never taking one another, the very essence of each other, for granted again. 

It made me think of you, Girl Across the Way. In the rare instances where we lock eyes for a second, I want to tell you that I am lonely too. That I’ll open my curtains every day this goes on if you do too. That if you have an anxiety attack and break a plate or cry, I’ll still be here, shuffling around in my pink pajamas, just across the way. 

I want to tell you that you exist because I am looking at you. 

adult lives

It's Saturday morning and I am emptying the dishwasher. For what must be the 100,000th time in this life. 

Maybe it’s Norah Jones on the radio, but this menial household chore is an experience for me as I fixate on the ceramic white plates that I bought from an artisan storefront in 2012. 

Our true adult lives start first and foremost in a place. It could begin in a grimy women’s bathroom in New York City, or while eating in the brightly colored cafeteria at Google in Mountain View, California. If you're paying attention, you know the specific moment your adult life begins because it just slaps you in the face. It's like a small explosion in the air, and it's kind of painful. All of the inanimate things around you pulsate and say, "Congratulations! Your adult life has just begun!" My adult life began in 2012 when I picked up these plates at a charming storefront on 15th Street. Walking out of the store, I knew my life had changed forever. 

I remember the thoughts. The sense of agency. These aren't my parent's plates and they aren't my roommate’s plates either. These are my plates, in what will supposedly be my kitchen. Despite the pack of eight, I remember the realization of actually only technically needing one plate, one fork, one spoon, one knife. I was one person, after all. What a beginning of your adult life way to feel.

As I put away the wine glasses this morning and then organize the coffee cups, I am hit with a surprise wave of gratitude. I acknowledge that since the buying of the plates, there have also been six years worth of evenings filled with wine, stories, good food, belly laughs. There have been groggy mornings that turn into long days of hard work, and the plates have been there for all of it. These are the artifacts of our lives, memorialized in the background of all our comings and goings, subtle and inanimate; forever there. 

The funny thing of course is that there is really no such thing as forever there. A plate could break at any time, and shatter into a million tiny pieces. 

sun worshipper

The sun and I, we go way back. 

I am a water baby, born into a swimming pool somewhere in California. The consistencies of my youth are remembered by two glorious elements: Sun, and Water. 

I found rare silence and solitude in the depths of the pool. How long can you hold your breath? My long dark hair, bleached golden by the Sun, the ends shimmery like fish's tail in the water. My skin, a warm light-roasted coffee color, an exact replica of the caramel skin of my father. My Dad, a sun-worshiper too.

The Water. A mesmerizing, serene blue, which, when uninhabited, was without a ripple in it, allowing me to manipulate its surface however I wanted. I would dive deep into the pool and imagine myself driving a car straight into it. It was probably too shallow to be diving like that. But the danger of the dive excited me. 

Now I have no swimming pool, and my doctor says I must avoid the Sun. I want to shake her and say, but the Sun and I are friends, we go way back. I'm a water baby, my father's daughter; burnt like coffee, sweet like caramel. I can't resist the Sun. Its warm, seductive rays. My body vs. my brain. Which one do you think will win? 

But this is not 1996. Here, halogen lights replace the Sun, in a windowless doctor's office on floor twenty two. Of course, I say. I'll stay away from it. I'll go to work, get married. Pay my bills, have some kids. Put on sunscreen. Drive safely. 

As I'm leaving, the woman at the front desk says something about insurance, and I stare at her like she has three heads before nodding my head dutifully. Because now I'm an adult. 

When did everything change? I can't remember anything happening between back then, and right now. 

I am a water baby. No water and I am drowning. 

just happy

Shoot. Somebody important has just asked me why I'm not writing anymore. "Maybe you're too happy," she says, like it's a challenge, daring me to agree. I have just told her I am "doing great" three times in a row. 

I scoff at her suggestion like happiness is the devil. “Must be work,” I grumble, appropriately hateful. But I love my work.

You could just be happy, she says again, her face kinder this time. She wants that for me. Anyway she already knows I am in an embarrassingly fulfilling stage of my life. She knows because I have told her. Embarrassing because complete happiness is kind of a silly thing. Right?

You could just be happy.

I think about being just happy; letting all the goodness that surrounds me each day sink in through my skin and go straight to my heart, pumping out just happy blood throughout my entire just happy body, but that doesn’t seem fair. Because, there’s Syria and The Middle East, there’s “Donald Trump” and nuclear weaponry and the goddamned future of America. But also: there’s the sweet daughter of a car mechanic, her blue eyes staring wildly at me tonight in line at the grocery store. Nobody has brushed this child’s hair in years. Something tells me he is a single dad. Something about how his daughter looks at me.

Her seven-year-old face when dad’s credit card doesn’t go through. His rough hands fumbling through a beat-up wallet. Try this one, he says, as if the entire world depends on it, because it does. Hmm, not that one either, sir. Those cards just don’t seem to be working. Do you have any cash? The daughter, now she’s crying.

I am going to have a heart attack in this Safeway.

So this is what happens when I try to write a happy story. You could just be happy, she says.

But that doesn’t seem fair.

nothing + everything

We walked uphill for a while. The tall yellow Aspen trees were striking against a backdrop of a confidently blue sky.  It was like all of the magical places I read about as a child – the Secret Garden, Narnia, Oz –  had unified together to create this extra-fantastical place. I felt quietly happy. This must be what true happiness is, I thought. Peacefulness.

Finally we stopped and looked at the trees around and above us, coming together like a roof over our heads, protecting us from nothing and everything all at once. It was a moment that I’ll try to remember forever. Two enchanted friends brought together in life by some extraordinary being – some higher power – or maybe just by coincidence.

The occasional rustling leaves were the only sound we heard for a while. We were unnaturally still in this natural setting, stunned by the silence and humbled by the beauty in everything. After a minute or two she turned and looked at me, her smiling face shining and exuberant in the golden light. “Should we put something out into the universe?” she asked. She had a way of challenging me, even when she wasn’t trying to.

Yes, I smiled, feeling overwhelmed. Looking at her carefully, as if to warn that I would pose an even more difficult question, I quietly asked:  

“But what do we want?"

That was the day I wished for you. 

this is where

Fall is so romantic, isn’t it? It’s so romantic. 

Something about winter being on its way but not quite here yet is romantic. Like the honeymoon before a marriage. It’s all fun, right now. It’s just fall, and it’s just fun.

I also love the fall colors. The reds and yellows and oranges make me want to cuddle up with you and give you a big squeeze and fall asleep on your shoulder before you start snoring and I have to scoot away.

Also, you look horribly mismatched in this season. What is with the green flannel underneath the size-too-small black cashmere sweater? It’s not a good look, but it makes me think I could love you forever.

You are out hunting but I still hate duck. I will always remember a few nights ago at dinner at our friend’s house when you asked me to try some, and reluctantly I did, and right before we went to bed you whispered, “Thank you for trying the duck.” I will remember that forever because it reminded me of that Jonathon Safran Foer quote. “I am doing something I hate for you. That’s what it means to be in love.” I didn’t sleep at all that night. Only because I was afraid of the quote.

I have some bad news. You know that book, titled This Is Where I Leave You?

Of course you don’t know the book. I could fall in love with that, too, and we could laugh about it in the cold air, as the wet yellow and red leaves stick to the bottom of our boots, my frozen hand in yours.

The title of that book makes me want to cry. I didn’t mean for you to fall in love with me. I never thought you would.

Maybe it’s just the season. Fall is so romantic.

This is where I leave you.

beautiful ruins

-I don’t know, she said. Sometimes I don’t feel special at all.

-Nonsense. You are special. Everybody knows that.

-But I just read this book, she said, about these magnanimous characters whose lives were reduced to nothing. This famous actress lined up for greatness. Ends up a widowed theater teacher in small-town Idaho, dies of ovarian cancer. You know, all these larger-than-life characters – these people in their twenties – thought they were going to live big colorful lives, on the coast of Italy or on stage or in Hollywood or on Wall Street or something, because they thought that they were different, and they WERE different, but, then life happened and their dreams got away and they stopped chasing whatever it was that made them feel alive. Take me, for example. I used to think I wasn’t ordinary. In fact, I used to be sure that I wasn’t. I am so obviously different, I would think. But these days, I have to ask how many people, how many “burn-outs,” thought that that they were different, special, extraordinary, and now they work a day job and are in retail or insurance or some other silly, shitty, arbitrary, black-and-white, colorless thing, and they never

(He interrupts her)

-You are very important. I have to think that you have some substantial impact on everyone that you meet.

-That is really nice of you.

-It’s true.

-That makes me feel better. I think I am sad when I feel ordinary, so thank you for making me feel special.

-You are special.

(Pause)

Actually, you are extraordinary.

amen

And just like that, it was summer.

It’s the greenest I have ever seen this place. The air is cool at night. The sun stays out past curfew, striking the sky with defiant yellows and oranges. There is live music everywhere, all the time. It’s not even good, but I want to cry with happiness. I want to break all the rules. How I forgot about the cricket buzz, the chirp chirp chirp, the late-night energy and the drinking, the vibrant life in everything, the new friends and the old ones, that early morning sunrise. I have freckles again. And I'm sweating through my dress, sticky with booze and heat and easy, breezy laughter. “Cute freckles,” he says. “Welcome back,” I laugh.

We have new neighbors. Everybody says hello. It's nine thirty p.m. and there’s rap music coming from that place a few doors down. The dog is barking. The kid is crying. That couple is holding hands, radiant with the exciting newness of their sweet, comforting relationship. “How ya doing?” they nod as they pass our porch. “It’s summer,” I shrug, smiling and embarrassed. They’re charmed by my sincerity.

Is the red brick on those houses always that red? The trees always this glorious? The sky so captivating / the air so airy / and the roses oh-so-rosy?

That weepy Ben Harper song. She’s only happy in the sun.

And all of God’s people said:

Hallelujah, Amen.

twenty four

The funny thing was that I had everything I wanted. It started with my room. I had a room of one’s own, a room that I’d always hoped to create. So much white, so much simplicity. “A place where I could really write,” as the writers say. And I had the kind of friends that people die for, the kind of friends who constantly surprise with what life has taught me must be pure, unconditional love – friends who cooked me dinner and thought I was spectacular and answered the phone on the third ring. I always thought that was a testament to my friendships. My friends answered the phone when I called.

But the amount of “more” that I wanted was scary, and so juxtaposed the sweet, easy simplicity of the room I loved so much. In theory, I was happy. “She designed a life she loved,” the gift said, and I suppose by then I had. But I wanted the American idea of more: the car with leather seats, the locker room with eucalyptus steamed towels; the uncomfortable, expensive shoes. How predictable I had become, a misguided rat late to the never-ending race. But not too late to join it.

spring

Spring is two days away.

As I get older, I’ve started to feel that either the seasons are changing with me, or that I am changing with the seasons. I can feel the difference in the air, and in the way that I laugh. You'll get a giggle in the summertime, on a warm evening with a roof deck somewhere that’s trying too hard to be trendy, with marquee letters that spell out BAR and all of those waiters with their silly gingham bow ties. It’s getting late, and your hardly-funny joke solicits a reserved giggle with just enough authenticity to suggest that maybe I laugh easily, that maybe I'll laugh even if it's not that funny. You'll get a loud, deep-down-in-my-belly laugh in the winter. An embarrassingly honest, uncontrollable laugh that surprises even me with its transparency, prematurely revealing everything you need to know because it’s a fearless laugh that is not trying to hide. My laugh changes with the seasons. I swear that’s just how it is.

Someone special (you) told me once that they liked the way I laugh because “it comes from here.” I wonder if you remember that. I wanted to say that that was my winter laugh, even though it was summer.

You should know that I'm onto you – that you are so predictable in all your senseless, roundabout unpredictability. I knew to watch out when you said you didn’t eat seafood or that you didn’t believe in the stock market, that my electricity bill seemed really high and maybe I should count the math. I’ve never been good at math, but spring is two days away, and I’m counting. Because my springtime laugh is hardly a laugh at all, because my springtime laugh says goodbye. 

the unknowns

Mercury is in retrograde. Chaos prevails. You win, Universe.

Seventy beautiful degrees in what should be the dead of winter. Loud noises late at night – things falling off the shelves without explanation in the pantry, the television turning on with no warning, the back door slamming itself open as if to announce an unwanted presence. People I love coming and going, coming and going. What are you even doing here? I ask. His reply is pedantic. It annoys me. Didn’t you hear? He says. Mercury is in retrograde. 

Later that day I walk against the wind. Embrace the chaos. Embrace the chaos. Embrace the chaos. I think about what that means. Then I think about what an incorrigible knot of hair I will be left with once the wind is done with me. My lips are chapped. Something’s in my eye. I can't see who you are or what you'd like from me or when or if or how I am ever going to get even a semblance of the life I want. Everything is sticky and tangled and uncomfortable. This is me, not embracing the chaos.

I get into my car, drive home, and take about twenty seven deep breaths. The unknowns are winning. I convince myself that in six years I’ll be Sunday-brunching somewhere wonderful with a rewarding career and a pile of important emails waiting upon my return on Monday morning, with a nice person and a nice dog and some nice Tupperware back at the nice apartment with the windows that I will look out of later that night, with a life that is full of shared calendars and kale salads and oohing and ahhing at friend’s plain-looking babies, where it will all be delightfully boring, terribly stable. I feel better and think again about embracing the chaos – appreciating this time for what it is, for what it brings, and for the future perspective it will grant me. A horribly stable life awaits you. Kale. Plain babies. Big windows. Some structure.

I feel better. My mind has been quieted, Mercury momentarily overruled. But downstairs I hear something that the hardwood floors cannot disguise – slow, steady, footsteps. 

I am not alone anymore. Who is in my house? 

sunrise, norah jones

Everything is white. It’s making me restless. The snow isn’t melting and sometimes at night it falls in big pieces and sticks to my hair and clothes and it’s everywhere, fluffy white everything, and it’s all really beautiful, and it all looks really beautiful, especially when the sun comes out the next day and you can see that it’s still white everywhere, pure and natural goodness covering everything. But it’s making me restless. It must be: the obligatory peacefulness that all white brings. Unifying the world into one giant entity draped in soft powdery nothing – hiding everything that individualizes us – your car, your garden, your hands, your face. Isn’t it lovely, she asks? The scars of the world hidden underneath a sheet of soft, white snow?

But I like the scars. I like the rough sidewalks, the uneven concrete, the T loves C scribbled in loud red graffiti. I like the dying flowers and the neighbor’s children’s shoes scattered in the front lawn. Now I can’t see anything. It’s just white, and it’s not melting, and I think I like change and I'd like to wake up to something new, but sometimes the snow and all of its staying power makes me wonder if a thing I should have actually let stay was you. 

believe

She found it baffling that some people didn’t believe in her. Not offensive, just hard to understand. She was so sure that she would do great things, produce good work and move about the world with intention, surrounded by fulfilled and enriched people and things, that she was always stumped by those who told her, “You can’t.” She knew that she was flawed. She knew that she was riddled with imperfections, overcome with impatience and one thousand other brazen, unapologetic idiosyncrasies. But she was forceful and quick, smart and unique enough to counter the predictable and premature assumptions she knew you would make. She was a fighter, no doubt about it, and she would fight her way to the end, furious with those who said that she couldn’t, trusting in those who said that she could.

I got a note from her yesterday. “Do you still believe in me?” That’s all it said.

I have spent much of today wondering how to tell her that I don’t know. 

little girl

Dear little girl,

You look really darling with your flowers and your sneakers. The bouquet is maybe too big for your little hands to hold onto, but that’s okay, it’s probably good practice for the rest of your life, where you will struggle to hold onto some big, heavy things. I can tell by your restless eyes that you are up to something – that your brain is always on, infinitely curious, constantly searching. As you get older, people might ask you what you are looking for. You don’t have to tell them. And you don’t have to know.

I can see that you will be beautiful. You are charming me already, and we only just met. I wonder about all of the men you will hurt as you dazzle your way through this world. And I wonder about all of the people you will offend, just by being you. I wish I could be there when you learn that sometimes your best is not good enough. I hated that lesson.

Little girl, you are smart and precocious. In ten years you will read Gone with the Wind and you might want to be a little bit like Scarlett O’Hara or Jo March from Little Women, but you won’t have any idea how. In twenty years, you’ll learn that you can actually be the leading lady of your own story – but you will have to write out all of the chapters. This is not always easy.

One last thing, little one. Be kind to those who love you. Be gracious for what you have, and decide if what you do not have is truly worth seeking.

You might find that all you really need are some flowers and a good pair of sneakers.

xx

inside

Here we are again. The universal quiet of an empty house. I feel a cool hint of fall through the window as summer begrudgingly stands down. In the midst of the drumming summer chaos, I sometimes forget how much I like the sound of rustling leaves outside, the hum of the insects, and yet the stillness, the softness, the stability. No creaky stairs tonight. No running water. Just white sheets and dim light, and a whining train somewhere nearby. I don't play any music. I think about the predictability of change and all of its relentless irony, which I am reminded of by the circle of rust that surrounds the shiny drain in the shower, or by the changing leaves of golden yellows – catching the sun-kissed city by surprise though the leaves are changing like they always do. We’re back, the yellows say. Knock knock, purr the deep reds. They weren’t here just a week or two before, so things are different – things have changed by definition – yet what about this seasonal pattern makes fall less of an exciting transformation and more the underwhelming product of short-lived routine?

Here we are again.

I am locked inside the quiet.