Change turns me into a Wookiee. Transition makes me queasy, makes my insides move like a soft-boiled egg. I must hibernate this summer, use the fog as a shield. Put my head down, pack my bags, leave on a jet plane.
It’s time to make some moves. I will send care packages of cookies and popcorn, make lists of books to give away, fold endless piles of t-shirts and mail boxes of shoes to New York.
I have never been more ready for this day.
Writing it in my planner, or on a calendar, in clear, thick ink makes it real but only in my head. I spend a day or so whispering the date out loud, dropping it casually into conversations with acquaintances, making it off-hand and casual. The date has legs, it grows arms, puts its hair into a ponytail and starts jogging down the street. We exist in an uneasy harmony, seemingly working against each other for the same goal.
You don’t have any money.
You don’t have a job.
Why would you do this now?
Silence the dissent. Ignore the nay-sayers. Plod on as if nothing will change.
I start small. The early stages of packing masquerade as spring-cleaning. I stand covered in dust in the middle of my room, having cleared out some of the detritus of four years. There’s more light, more space, more room to breathe. Books come crashing down as I try and rearrange them on the shelf. Soon they will be in boxes, an address scrawled in frantic marker, zipping across the country. I am mercenary in my organization, disgarding envelopes of love letters, stacks of photos, piles of paper kept in a box in my closet. Time to start anew.
I want the world and I wanted it yesterday, but I’ll have to wait until next week to have it. I wonder if what I imagine the next step to be like is a falsehood or if it will be better than I imagine. I try to keep my expectations low so that I am not blindsided when the next three months zip by in a haze of park beers and porch pancakes. I want to hit the ground with both feet, feel the pavement solid and secure and tight. Clarity, like a sharp pinch adminstered by uncut nails, nips.
It’s time to cut ties, make moves, put books into boxes and drag them, lightly sweaty in the San Francisco sun, to the post office. I will have a tag sale and pour mimosas and grill pineapple and sell my things to friends as if I am not actually leaving, merely putting things into storage for the indefinite. I trip over my roots on the way to the train or walking up the hil with groceries in both hands, plastic bags cutting into my hands as they sweat. Melancholy builds every day in pieces, stacked in the corner like firewood.
I don’t think I want children, but sometimes I don’t know. I often entertain fantasies of my offspring, robust, apple-cheeked. I see them walking with vigor through piles of leaves, eating sand by the fistful on the beach, falling on the street and skinning their knees. They would be well-rounded and take karate. At night, they would sleep hard, their small chests rising softly with each breath.
I believe you could climb Everest or be the President or a senator or at least the mayor of a small town. I applaud the little things, like when you get your mother a birthday present or buy a new pair of pants. I deliver endless diatribes of advice culled from the words of others and the breadth of my own experience.
Live your life in pieces. Make it manageable, make it small. Digest.
I watch your brow furrow, your eyes gain light, recognition. This process of thought, this slow, quiet understanding breaks my heart. Each decision packs meaning. Thai for dinner. Waffles for breakfast. Wearing the blue shirt instead of the gray. I want to grab your hands and walk you down the street towards the airport or the ski slope or the organic farm in Petaluma. Fly to Bali, work on a vineyard. Pick brussel sprouts in the noonday sun.
This is the way to go. This is what you should be doing. This is what will make you happy.
My sister conducts all phone calls in transit from work to the subway. She claims it’s the only time she has to talk. When she’s home and not working, she eats homemade pie and drinks Blue Moon. I talk to her in fitful 15 minute conversations. She always cuts me off in the middle of stories.
“I’m getting on the train. I have to go. NOW. Okay. ‘Bye.”
I’m left staring at the phone, three hours behind, imagining her skinny frame disappearing down the stairs.
What were once sprawling, lackadaisical conversations with friends have now been truncated, turned into twenty minute calls with bullet points.
“Job is fine, I got a haircut, my roommate sucks, I’ve become a vegetarian.”
“Family is fine, roommates are fine, I’m a lesbian now. When are you coming home?”
No one has the time to talk for very long. Our lives, once a tangled mess of crossed wires and intersections, have now become neatly separated, sectioned off into individual containers. In San Francisco I am three hours behind and three thousand miles away from the people I used to need like breathing. Some of us had each other and for a while I had two of them out here, living on the same block, draping ourselves on each other’s couches, rummaging through the fridge. Greg had a key to my front gate and came over when he pleased, sitting in my room and watching television. He left in April, taking with him the last vestige of my comfort.
I find the time to make important phone calls at work, sneaking into the conference room or standing by the shrieking fax machine. We talk about what it would be like to be together in the same place again, if even for a day or so. The reunion, as adults with lives and conference calls and business cards. The territory we navigate now is unsteady.
The absence is filled by others. Friendships crash and burn. I latch onto people quickly at first, grateful for anyone that seems normal. They turn out to be duds and I find myself tossing aside acquaintances, shuffling them off and making connections with as many people as possible in order to find something that sticks. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and there are already people I don’t want to see.
Visits are momentous occaisons, filled with stumbly nights at bars and breathless tours of parks and coffee shops. Often these are not as exciting as previously hoped. The time constraint lends a frantic quality to the visit. We’re more sensitive, acutely aware of the brevity of our time together and fiercely dependent on the fantasy we’ve built.
It’s dangerous if a visit stretches long, past a week or more. Scenes form in my head of whatit would be like if someone decided to stay. I see brunches and dinners, shopping and falling back into the old routines, ones that we know by heart. When it’s over there’s an emptiness. Sometimes I cry after they’ve left, wishing they had stayed for a little longer,wanting to extend the past.
Sometimes my sister and I talk about what we’d be doing if we lived in the same city. I can hear her weary and tired on the end of the line. It’s past midnight for her, she’s been up for a while and is waiting to go to bed. We take turns monologuing our lives to each other in ten and fifteen minute spurts. I sit on a stool by my window, smoking and paging through magazines.
“Why don’t we just hang out tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll come over and then we can get brunch and see a movie and then I will drink beer, eat pie and watch TV.”
“You don’t live here,” she says, ever the practical one.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say.
Seeing the cost of California for the first time was like getting hit in the stomach.
I was anxious. I had been drinking and chain smoking in a Volkswagen station wagon for two and a half weeks with two friends, driving from New Jersey to California, fresh out of college and ready to hit the ground running on the West Coast. The landscape of the West is ostentatious. Huge crags of rock rose out of an immense, frothy sea, cutting across the horizon and piercing the sky, which was an unnatural and terrifying shade of blue. It was cold and I could see fog rolling in across the water. We were on highway 1, a windy road with sheer drops to the ocean on one side and imposing walls of crumbly rock on the other. We were two hours away from my mother’s house, which was our final destination. I took a picture of Wendy standing on the edge of the cliff, the Pacific stretching out behind her, silhouetted against the setting sun.
I do these things because you understand guitar solos and clean sentences. I do these things because you let me win fights and deliver sharp, reassuring pats on my bicep when we’re standing in line for the movies. I do these things because I care about you very much.
Her gums show a lot when she smiles or talks. I wondered if it would be rude to ask if her teeth ever get cold.
You’re sad because it’s easy and because it’s comfortable and because it’s safe. Sad makes it easier to get through the day. It wraps you in a protection that few can penetrate.
Your nerves are thin filaments, stretched to their limit. Sad gives you a quiet fire. Your skin shifts in subtle movements, like small solders are beneath the sruface, readying for battle.
Sadness is a mantle you’ve worn your whole life. To be sad lends mystery, provides an alibi, makes it so that you don’t have to smile at children or balloons or a bouquet of roses on top of a newspaper box on the side of the street. Sad excuses you from niceties, social obligations, phone calls.
I can’t come to your birthday party, I’m sad today.
No, I don’t want a bagel, I’m sad.
Sad doesn’t make you cry on the bus or lose an hour of time standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open. It grabs you lightly by the collar and shakes you awake every morning. You shrug it on like a sweater before you leave the house.
Sometimes people see it on you if you stand in the right light. You appear out of focus, hazy, your edges erased. You travel through the day in silence. Sometimes it bothers you, but other days the silence climbs onto Sad’s shoulders and you piggyback them both down the street.
The burden is too much some days. These days are the worst. As you stand in front of the closet, Sad looks at you from the rocking chair.
“I’m not in the mood today,” you say.
Sad is reproachful, scorned. It retreats into itself until it is a tiny package, knees pulled to chin.
“I can’t today. I have things to do. I have to make a phone call. I have to go to the bank,” you say.
Sad never responds, just stares sullenly out the window. When you leave the house, you picture a tantrum, books thrown at the wall, broken dishes, jagged pencil lines up and down the hallway walls.
It’s a different world outside without Sad. Trees snap in sharp definition against the sky, buildings look tight, their edges like a knife. The world lacks the patina of heartbreak and it is refreshing and clear and wakes you up. Muscles in your back loosen, your movements become fluid, your joints roll smooth and strong and sure. Sun reflects off the windows of cars passing as you wait for the light to change. Your jaw grinds to a halt. The air is taut. You crackle with possibility.
