lycanthropia

is officially OFF THE HOOK this year. True, many dear people aren’t here (Rae! Rosa! Blee!); but other people are, and, well—see my random bleats on Twitter for more. But I am having a wonderful time, which I hope will make it worth all the sick-crazy amount of work I’ll have to do next week to catch up. So many people I haven’t seen in so, so long. So many drinks. So many moments of belly-laughing, cheekbone-hurting laughing, weeping-laughing. Hugging my beloved women, my writers and poets, and saying tipsily to their dear faces, I love you, I love you. And for just a second, standing swaying outside of Frontera Grill looking up at the Sears Tower and the half-moon just beyond it, thinking okay, so I will never get over what has happened to me and that somehow being, under the influence of chartreuse and jamaica limonada and tequila and ceviche and duck tacos, just completely & beautifully fine & perfect. —I think that was supposed to be a poem & I have now somehow ruined it. But I love everyone tonight too much to care. Also, chartreuse is magic in a shot glass. Also, these pictures I took at Frontera? Are just so so embarrassingly awful, and of course I will post them ALL tomorrow. And tag EVERYONE. You have been warned, chicas.

(PS I had the Enchiladas a la Plaza: “Pan-seared red chile enchiladas, grilled hedgehog mushrooms, red chile carrots & potatoes, tangy Napa cabbage, smoked homemade fresco cheese.” And a blue agave/Cointreau margarita which undid the weird bilious nostalgia of the chartreuse and made my head spin in a gentle orbit of daffyness, the kind that makes you owlishly pull various objects out of your coat pockets, stare at them in happy perplexity, put them back again, and then incoherently pull people toward you muttering that you want to, nay must, must hug them. Whereupon etc.)

(PS also the bookfair is a nightmarish claustrophobic people-watching CLUSTERFUCK. Where I of course plan to spend most of tomorrow, so. Okay must sleep now. Klonopin kicking in. Shift starts at 10:30, alarm set for 10, does that give time to get all-important life-elixir liver-tonic coffee?)

(Though, no thanks to how vituperatively I still at times loathe my ex.)

Dear Mr. Twombly,

There is a rain shower outside, and the sky is dark. But on the dimmest day it always seems white and light in your gallery. It smells of wine, or bruised fruit, and I think it is quieter than any church. Sunday afternoons are my favorite time to be here.

You died not long ago. Isn’t that something? Did you ever believe with your whole body that something was real, and then find out the hard way that it wasn’t? I think you probably did. Where are you today? Do you spend any time with your paintings, now?

Maybe the wine smell is some kind of solvent they use to clean your pictures, or a preservative. Or maybe someone actually snuck in some wine. I’m sitting on a wooden bench looking at a series of five untitled canvases from 1959. There’s a strip of wood nailed to the floor in front of each piece, warning us not to get too close. It’s a good reminder, and in this case one with metaphorical significance—that no matter how close we get, those inscrutable, inarticulate marks are never going to resolve into words or meanings we can understand. That they are like wild animals who can be observed but never spoken to. Your art objects to us, your marks bark back. And there is something in the spacing of the marks that makes me think I would not have the temerity to address them anyhow.

I like thinking that I can come here a little every week, over time, to get to know the marks slowly, as a naturalist would. An unhurried acquaintanceship. I also like thinking of you making them, in some singular combination of deliberate and deep accident, deeply accidental is the movement of art, it is as close to an aesthetic as anything I have ever had, along with my abiding belief in the value of increase for its own sake, in ampersand.

Despite my refusal to anthropomorphize them, I see hearts, crosses, whorls, spirals, circles, knots, boxes, curls, hooks, loops, checks, as if the left hand is trying to speak to the right. I am always trying to talk to him, Mr. Twombly, the woman is always trying to say something, is that a distortion of prayer, talking to the wrong entity, but why saddle it with that, let me step back from fixed ideas about rectitude and deviation, purity and adulteration, straight lines and warped ones. Because aren’t there only lines?

Even when it’s bent, it’s still love or love then most of all, the ground reaching up toward the rain, rain leaning its full weight into the ground.

After all we are bound to find ourselves in the stochastic, this explains why we make constellations.

Your later bigger canvases, like “The Age of Alexander” (1959-60) or “Bay of Naples” (1961) or “Triumph of Galatea” (1961) all have the same arc or curve: they start at the lower left corner and develop upward, thickening in an historical or almost Hegelian progression, with erasures and pencillings evolving into densely complexifying blots of pigment textured, impastoed, rendered dimensional. It’s a simple movement, marching eastward, left to right like a timeline, but one with an attitude of mourning, as if saying that the lost things shall not be forgotten (except that they are forgotten) (the old delicate spare things of memory obliterated by the vivid brute youth of the present, with its implied industralism, a fascism—)

Does this word say “zero,” or “Zeno”? I am going to choose to believe, both; like Dickinson’s polyvalent dashes and word alternates. Here an erased spidery blue triangle becomes above and to its right now a bold black one, drooling at one side: but I cannot say whether it is better or any more correct or improved, only more insistent.

“Naples” seems to be in some way about breasts, “Galatea” about cannonballs, or kinds of damage.

I peer around the corner but know better right now than to visit “Say Goodbye Catullus,” because in my current state your rose and its bloodied vulnerabilities are bad enough—by which I mean the five paintings and small sculpture which together comprise “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair” (1985). There’s that word again, “sentiment,” with its implied contempt—but here it is juxtaposed against the unabashedly genital-pink Mariolatry of your roses, weeping their way unapologetically down the wall.

In their company I feel less alone, less ashamed; you probably didn’t mean it to, but these pieces of work reaffirm a path through the abject. That there is salvation through unalloyed emotion and its untrammelled expression, however distasteful the world finds it.

In college I loved a girl who broke things off, as they have sometime tended to do in my life; it seemed to me at the time that she’d had every right to try to put as much space between us as was possible. Some weeks later, I was supposed to go to a concert with my teacher and on the day of the concert I had run into this girl in the library, she had told me about a dance she had attended, and I was suddenly and unexpectedly shaking with anger. I met up with my teacher but apologized, said I could not go with her as I was angry and completely appalled by it.

“Finally!” she said. “I’ve been angry for you for months.”

What?

“You were only asking for a very simple level of care.”

No, no—on the contrary, I had been demanding, horrible, insatiable. I had behaved intolerably. I had importuned her repeatedly, made her life hellish. She had been forced practically to escape from me in the end, I was so persistent and needy.

My teacher shrugged. “Unmet needs begin to seem monstrous.”

We went to the concert anyway and I found it very invigorating and freeing.

In these five rose paintings, you use a text drawn from Rumi (maybe? anyway his name is written in, though you do love to use Rilke also):

Rose oh sheer
contradiction

in his despair he drew
the colors from
his own heart

in drawing and drawing
you his pains are delectable
his flames are like water

 

 

 

 

 

 

in drawing and drawing
you his pains are
delectable his flames
are like water

(It can’t be any accident that I have twice mistyped “paints” for “pains.”)

The five paintings are liquid and fearlessly runny and dripped into incoherence, but as a series also they wouldn’t be complete without this funny little raggedy white sculpture of a nailed-open coffin crowned by a vulva, I mean, to be completely honest, I don’t know how much more clearly a series has ever been openly about pussy. And I’m sorry she hurt you like that, but look what a beautiful thing you made out of it anyway, and it talks to me here, not alone anymore in a strange city on the eve of new employment, on the anniversary of abandonment, on the edge of a kind of cliff, and not just the cliff I think my frustrated friends sometimes want to push me off, but the kind off which you might fall or fly, 50/50 chance, it could go either way.

Look at us talking, Rumi and Rilke and you and me. Look at us not alone together.

Time to go home and make huevos rancheros, with an avocado quesadilla, followed by coconut paleta. I just wanted to say thank you, Mr. Twombly.

Wish me luck on my first day? I’ll tell you how it went, next weekend.

Love, Jennifer

The girl woman singer died in her flat, alone in her bed.  Too many people said, “It was to be expected,” because we knew this girl who was a woman but really she was a girl. We knew she had problems and she did not have the luxury the rest of us do to handle our problems privately, with dignity. She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching. We knew she had demons that were bigger than her, demons she tried to fight or she didn’t, we can’t possibly know. Her struggles were documented and parodied, celebrated and ridiculed. Celebrity. Call. Gossip. Response. We have seen the pictures of this girl woman in the street, barefoot, in the street, her midriff bare and swollen, in the street, her makeup smeared, her unforgettable hair, stringy, pasted to her pale face, her body being carried from her home in a red body bag. There was no privacy for her, not even in death. That is a tragedy too.

I love her music and listen to it regularly. I always hoped she might survive herself, hoped she would give her adoring fans more of her voice, hoping she would give herself the blessing of a long life. I heard she died from my best friend who sent me a text message and we commiserated about what a shame it was for a girl woman to die at the age of twenty-seven. It is a different kind of devastating to think about the life she will never know, about those gifts that come with more years of living than the girl singer was afforded. I do not wonder about the cause of her death. The how of her demise isn’t my business. And yet. When I first heard of her death, I wondered if she died alone. I wondered if she was scared. There is fear and there is fear. Now, I wonder if she knew real happiness in her short life. I wonder if she felt loved or knew peace. [Roxane Gay for The Rumpus]

When I don’t write and then I try to write again, it’s like the water’s been turned off at the main, and the rust has settled at the bottom of the hot water heater, and for a long while after you turn on the tap the water comes out muddied and with jolts and judderings of air that rattle the plumbing—

I write tonight quite frightened, of what I cannot tell you, it’s too embarrassing. Only that I have been positioned for the last hour with my back pressed against solid things—the wall, the mattress,—needing something against my back, a position which comforted me as a very young child, a girl, nothing could sneak up on me, nothing could hurt or surprise me. Often I would also shut my eyes tightly and above all shove my fingers into my ears as hard as I could, so I would not hear the sounds, only the roaring of my own blood.

This will be all rust and air bubbles for a long time, I fear.

I am finally stable again on Zyprexa Zydis, but I am also eating again, a great deal, and I suppose I must reconcile myself to this new weight and shape; but I am cranky about it. Beggars cannot be choosers, we are told. So I know I’m lucky not to be crazy and just to be fat, but it does seem like insult added to injury.

Still my friend B. and I persist with our Couch-to-5K running program (#c25K for the Twitter-pated), and we start Week 4 on Monday. I like the running, to my surprise, though I am much slower than when I last ran, in my early 30s. I feel taller after we’ve run for half an hour (well, intervals of walking and running).

The cat got her summer fur-shave and is velvety and adorable, scampering around all proudly. You can see it on her face: “I’m a fancy cat!”

Yesterday she climbed on the neighbor’s roof and couldn’t get down, so I had to break into their backyard and stand on a patio chair and haul her down, and she panicked at the last minute as they do, scrabbling for purchase on my face, so I have a pink claw-mark down my forehead and across the bridge of my nose, like Omar Little from The Wire but much less fetching. But the little cat had been calling for me so long, and I hadn’t heard, that today she has totally lost her voice, and when she mews there’s this raspy croak instead, like she’s been smoking three packs a day.

I am still very scared. But it will pass.

Let me tell you about “love is a food chain,” which is a bitter little slogan I made up for myself in college. The etiology of the concept is shaky in my mind now, but I think I meant by it that more sophisticated organisms devour more rudimentary ones. Or that, to put it in the vernacular, the ones you love never love you back—they love fancier cats. Or anyway less available ones. The slogan tries to express that desire is nothing but an endless chain of being with the Queen of Philosophy at the top—that we all yearn for someone out of our reach—and are yearned for by ones lower on the social ladder rungs than we ourselves.

I didn’t say it was a cheerful theory.

About a week ago, a close friend read me the riot act about continuing to obsess about my ex, but sometimes still I don’t know what to do but to do that. Romantic anguish having been my way of relating to the world for so long? Or at least my way of relating to text, to lyric. I don’t know another place inside my chest from which to sing, only the withdrawal of which Heidegger wrote. So am I obsessing by writing false sonnets, am I wallowing indulgently—or am I writing myself out of the hurt place, writing out my truth so that I can see it? I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know if there’s a way to know.

Poetry as self-indulgent; poetry as salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you it will kill you. My friend I think views me with some measured contempt—my medications that give me a hand tremor, my pretend-sonnets which memorialize endlessly the unworthy beloved—but this is not interesting and I will stop.

Mostly I just want to be able to go off meds so I can really write and really read again.

Mostly I wish I could live with the degree of suicidality I’d invariably encounter without medication.

While I was getting stable on meds, and finishing up grading for my rhetoric section, all of which could be done, thank God, from the sofa, I accidentally found various Internet writings by my ex: first his OKCupid page and then many posts on a polyamory forum, via all of which it was made brutally, blindingly clear how little he thought of our relationship and how eagerly he exited it, overlapping with a new lover (or lovers), and how dishonest he was during that process—but this isn’t quite right, it makes his betrayals sound personal and for the first time I get it, I understand that they were not. That he is just enacting his karma and I happened to get caught in the blast radius. That his behavioral choices really have nothing to do with me and almost nothing, in a way, to do with him. It is quite simply that his entire mode of being in the world is to be as little honest as possible. Is to keep all options open for as long as necessary, committing to nothing, to have a maximally wide realm of experiences available at all times no matter who must be lied to in the process.

I told another friend that the thought of being physically intimate with another person, even an embrace or kiss, nauseates me. I am sickened by the thought of touching anyone, as badly as I sometimes want to be held. And so I am grateful to be so happy alone; if I were unhappy alone, it is likely I would try to find someone, and I am paralyzed with fear that I would choose a similar person, riddled with similar pools of utter, constitutional duplicity.

The good news is that I’ve realized I no longer need to try to sort out whether my ex is lying or telling the truth: he’s always lying. It’s his way, as a black widow’s way is to run away from the flashlight beam I train on her crazy sticky web. There’s an old twelve-step joke:

Q. How can you tell when an alcoholic is lying?
A. His lips are moving.

and I understand this now. There is no point in ever speaking with him again, because he will always be lying. Because he is a liar and that is what they do. Is lie.

I am drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream over ice from a cup that his sister gave me. It’s a bright sunny yellow teacup that says GET HAPPY on the side, and I smile everytime I look at it, thinking: Why yes, thank you, I believe I shall.

I eat well and sleep well and I write as much as I can, paddling upstream against the current of my brain. I laugh with girlfriends and play with the cat and my life is charmed.

I read poems last night with my dear Ms. A. and I think I read badly, but it was hard to know. She read beautifully and I felt lucky to be reading with her. There was a small sea of completely strange faces (except M. and K. were there, thank God) and suddenly there I was reading dour barely-veiled accusatory confessional poems with words like cock and clitoris. At one point I had to restrain myself from giving a lecture on clitoral anatomy. But I hope at least one woman went home and looked up crura and bulbs of vestibule.

My twenties and thirties would have been completely different had I known about those body parts.

Do you see how much more there is than what we were taught? Why was the subcutaneous considered less worthy of note?

I don’t really believe that love is a food chain, anymore. I have had experiences of deep mutuality. I do believe that once the dynamic of pursuer/withdrawer is kicked off, within a relationship, it takes hard work to turn it around, like righting a ship in a gale. Both people need to be as conscious as possible. My ex wrote that he felt devoured and overwhelmed by me. Of course this astonishes me, as I perceived my requests for time and attention as being minimal and restrained (e.g. please come out of your office to share a meal with me rather than playing poker through dinner). I was ashamed of needing anything from him at all. Elizabeth Gilbert writes of a lover who needed more space “than a herd of American bison” and this is familiar. Or Christine Lavin singing, “If you want space, move to Utah.”

Mostly from reading his writing it’s clear that he never wanted to be my partner at all, and was lying from the outset. If that’s the case, it’s astonishing that he stayed for four and a half years.

This is obsessing according to my friend and I should stop it, also I should give up refined sugar and alcohol, there are so many ways in which a person can be better, it is unfortunate that I do not restrict myself more, or at all.

The beautiful thing about finding this writing by my ex, particularly the part in which he has an “erotic exploration” with a “dear friend,” and I’m using scare quotes because the first phrase sickens me and the second one seems highly dubious (since I’d never heard anything at all about this “dear friend” before she suddenly became sexualized, maybe someone gets upgraded to “dear friend” right before you go down on them)—anyway there was this rhapsodic, romantic-language description of the sexy evening they shared, and I only wished, I only wished I had been given this information or had found it a year ago, when it was deliberately concealed from me. Because it released me immediately from longing for him. Instantly and cleanly, like the downward slash of a sword, Manjusri’s vajra truth.

Non sequitur: I don’t want to kill the black widows. They don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. But what if they have babies, what if there are hundreds by the end of summer? My landlady will kill them, or the next tenant, so it may as well be me. But God how I hate ending the life deliberately of anything. Especially an animal with whom I feel such kinship. The one by the catnip plant next to the front door, she is so clever, so shy, so modest. I feel they are my totem animals, at present. They say, Leave me alone, or I will, if I must, if pressed to it, I will bite you.

"La Catrina" by Sylvia Ji

I’m calmer now and less frightened. The typing of words is so soothing, and the ice clinking in my Irish cream. Many of my most respected male colleagues think little of my blogging, I know. I am staying put. I am a gambler, I am betting that someday I hit paydirt here. I am wagering that I can find and forge an écriture feminine that will serve me in the long run. That there will be a long run. I have chosen monogamy with myself, to stay with me, I am in this marriage for the long haul, I will weather the periods of low libido and unattractiveness, I am committed to me, to staying alive and staying on meds until I can safely come off them, I am committed to writing in ways I don’t yet know what they are. But they will sit just fine here. They aren’t going to come if I slap my own hand away from various subject matters warningly.

I think I feel the same way about gaining weight. I am bothered about it, but not bothered enough to throw out the cookies. The controlling mother voice in my head is going to have to deal, because those Petit Écolier 70% dark chocolate biscuits aren’t going to eat themselves you know. And if I have a full round belly, then I do. Maybe in a thousand years’ time, after the zombie apocalypse, they’ll sacrifice rats and mutant pigeons to my infertile altar.

(I know one of my friends is legitimately concerned about my carbohydrate intake because she believes, with a lot of scientifically backed-up hard evidence, that carbohydrates in general, and grains and sugar in particular, have ruinous, epidemiological-proportion effects upon human health and mental well-being. I don’t think she’s wrong, but I am still in survival mode. I am still in the mode of, let me deal with all this blood splattered around my living room first, and then at some point let’s see about dusting and watering the plants.)

(An unfair metaphor most likely but I can think of no other. I’ve been watching Dexter. Anyway I try to keep the carb/fat/protein proportions even, the least I can do.)

Sheryl Crow has a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and she’s turning 50 this year. I can finish my PhD, find a teaching job, and adopt a daughter. I will name her Christabel. Or Isabel, or maybe even, why not, Jezebel. We’ll get a beagle puppy once she’s old enough, and a Subaru station wagon. I’ll be a fifty-year-old mom too. I don’t mind. What else have I got going on? Why not help out a little girl who doesn’t have a mom?

At four in the morning, yesterday, sleepless, I drove to the Asian donut shop for an old-fashioned. They open at four. The doughnuts are so soft when just baked, 75¢. I ate mine in the car with the windows rolled down, listening to the dawn sounds of birds and roosters and lawn sprinklers. A tow truck parked in front of someone’s house had the driver’s side window smashed in, the street littered with sparkling green glass beads. Two grown cats played in the middle of the street, like kittens. I couldn’t help but think of all the times my ex would go for walks with me when I couldn’t sleep, hand in hand around the neighborhood, watching the feral cats hunting for insects under the streetlights. He either lied then, saying he loved me above all else, forsaking others; or he lies now when he says his ideal sexual partnership includes coming and going freely, sleeping around no questions asked. Or his reality shifted drastically over a six-week period last summer. Which is possible. Though he’d made an identical set of “discoveries” when his last marriage ended in 2001. Maybe he has to keep rediscovering his truth.

Why would I want to be friends with someone whose reality is that unstable?

I am very calm, and I never want to see or hear from him again. If he were to try to speak to me, I would say only: Go away. Not even, Please go away. Just: Go away.

We had a whole life together, woven and intertwined, and he snipped, snipped, snipped until it all fell apart, then said, Look, there’s nothing here but some ugly tangled thread, I’m gone.

I asked a mutual friend to retrieve my audio/recording equipment back from him. She did so. He sent no note or email. I think he knows. I think he knows I found his writings. I think he is ashamed.

I took a bath tonight with cupcake-scented bubble bath and crème brulée whipped soap. As I slid down into the water, only toes and nose sticking up, I thought, as one does: This is so much better than that.

And yes, everything a contrast, still defined by what it is not, negative space shaping out the year since last year when he told me what he’d been doing for months. That’s okay. I don’t mind abjection for now. I can be the subaltern. I’ve been her before.

I wear my garnet wedding ring on my left hand, admire it throughout the day.

I will tell you another story: about a week ago, I went to my weekly Al-Anon meeting where, upon passing his dirty white car as usual on my way to the meeting room, I suddenly pulled my keychain pocket knife out of my purse and, since he doesn’t ever lock his car, opened the passenger-side door, knelt on the seat, and cut down the little pewter goddess figurine which Ms. J. gave me a long time ago, which hangs (well, used to hang) from his rear-view mirror. I had put it there after our first Baja trip, along with a Virgen de Guadalupe calendar card and a little rainbow-colored Guatemalan pouch holding a rose quartz. I didn’t want the other things anymore but I thought, he doesn’t get to have this goddess, with her curvy spiral belly and round breasts and upraised arms holding the full moon.

Heart hammering, I went on into my meeting and only slowly got my breath back. Then I realized, when he sees the cut ribbon lying in the passenger seat, probably this will provoke him to some outraged communication which I don’t want to hear (you violated me by entering my car without my permission, etc.). So I got up and went back out again and, this time more calmly, retied the ribbon and the Guadalupe card to the mirror. My guess is he will never, or not for a long time, notice the goddess is even gone. On my way back I passed his sponsor twelve-stepping a drunk guy, said hello (no reply) and went into the women’s bathroom. I ovulated at that moment, a dot of blood dripping into the toilet.

Then went back in and had a wonderful meeting. Step 11, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. When it was my turn I spoke of my gratitude for a program that lets me define what prayer and meditation are, who God is (and Her gender), and how I improve that connection with what one woman calls not her Higher Power but her Deepest Source. The goddess clutched in my sweaty palm. Now on a leather cord around my neck, after first soaking for three days in salt water to pull away and neutralize anything unwanted.

Afterward a group of us were walking out to the parking lot. His shape turned the corner just as we did, about ten steps ahead of us, dressed in jeans and oversized blue shirt. He looked dumpy and angry and sad all at once, trudging along. So I dragged my feet and stalled a bit to increase the distance between us, while my sponsor and I talked about running; my sponsor is the prettiest one, all lean and angular and Midwest Scandanavian blonde in shorts and running shoes. He started his car and left hastily. And she and I stood there several minutes more and I told her about finding his blog, the relief, the horrified amusement, the disgust, the feeling sexually broken, the med change, the everything.

Then I got in my car and drove to Sunflower Market. It’s hilarious, because for months now I’ve thought I’ll run into him there after the meeting buying coffee and half-and-half, because that’s what we always used to do after the Sunday night meeting. But I never have. Tonight, out of all nights, as I drive up, the Honda’s parked there. I curse and laugh and quote Casablanca, then drive to Whole Foods which has better food anyway, and get fabulous tuna and avocado roll and two delicious flourless pecan butter cookies.

Just one of those moments where I think, everything is so totally fine and thank God, thank God, I am not with him anymore. No more lying, no more flash-point rages, no more being ignored, no more minutely subtle attempts to make me doubt and question my own reality.

And yes it is a negative space, but that is okay. There is at least a space there to be filled soon, when I move to my new city, make new friends, start a new set of academic/artistic projects. At least I’m no longer sleeping every night with my arms stretched out to the east, soggy with longing and remorse, not knowing how to survive the hours feeling that my chest is being slowly crushed.

It’s called progress not perfection. And I’ll take it over the alternatives any fucking day.

I’m going to live until tomorrow. I’m going to fight a better fight then.

PS—I finally bought myself the watercolor painting set I’ve wanted for about twenty years. Opening the little pans of colour was like unwrapping candies. I had a smile on my face for hours. It was $15 and I still feel kind of guilty about it. But I can paint quilt patterns! I want to make a set of 9×12″ art quilts around the theme of, beds. Or maybe, tree trunks. The palo verde are so beautiful and curvaceous. I try to feel like them, instead of just with rolls of fat on my stomach and back and thighs.

Which reminds me: You should read this.

And this.

And also this.

And, OMG, this and this. And ABSOLUTELY this. See, I really am a feminist/literary blogger. Just not a particularly informative one. Hurling links at you ingraciously, without so much as an identifying hashtag.

But I love you—

Night before I bleed, restless, wordless. Trying to write the same poem all day and too agitated/dysphoric, not enough attention span. Not exactly unhappy, just unable to settle down to anything. Jittery, fidgety and teeth-grittingly aphasic. Can’t concentrate to read. Can only strings of nouns, verbs, odd words in odder places. Should have tried yoga. Should probably have taken Klonopin sooner. Tired and wired in equal measure.

Last night, though, finally the girl-dance birthday party of my dreams—thanks to Mark and Kelly’s generous willingness to let us hijack their front room, and Beth’s having portable speakers, as well as having plenty of Erasure, Madonna, Prince, James, Pet Shop Boys on her laptop. On my own iTunes I scrounged up Paula Abdul, the Cranberries, Pulp, Björk, The Cure, Depeche Mode, I don’t know what all else. We sang all the words and hopped around wildly and were literally drenched with sweat, it was glorious. Mark made mojitos, he and Kelly fed us tacos and guacamole and rice, Laura made her amazing fruit salad with strawberries and mangoes, and I brought an enormous fruit-decorated vanilla cake from Whole Paycheck (on sale for $12) and a bottle of Liebfraumilch. At some point there were white tequila shots with orange slices. We partied like it was 1999. My friends performed various sobriety field tests on me and I was judged fit to navigate. I drove home at 1 a.m. crying softly, in love with all my friends who are going to be insanely hard to leave, for a city where I no know one but my beloved hometown librarian, having not seen him in circa twenty years? But I am. I typed an official letter of acceptance and it’s clothespinned to the mailbox right now, for the postal carrier to pick up in the morning.

After the dance party, ibuprofen and faceplanting. I woke late and drank a liter of water. Then all today, post-dance fatigue and a deeper inertia but without relaxation, an agitation, I should be doing something, something, but what, but I am exhausted and allergic and half-menstrual. I managed to put away a load of laundry, wash and hang out another, repot a dying basil plant, plant catnip seeds for Pyewacket, run errands with Beth—I bought a white fitted sheet, which will save me washing sheets another week, and three wineglasses, the fourth in the box being broken, I haggled till I got 20 percent off. They are good wineglasses, a thin bell-like chime when you flick them gently with your fingernail. And I am tired of drinking out of water tumblers. Then I bought a packet of wildflower seed for $1, how could I not, though I have a hoarding problem with collecting seed packets, I am always going to plant them and never do, so I have enough desert-hardy flower seed now to fill a five-acre plot.

All day no appetite, bloated and disfigured, but I force myself to make a rehydrating cherry smoothie for breakfast, and later a small supper, linguini alfredo, plenty of black and pink peppercorn ground on top, sea salt, the last of the Liebfraumilch with ice cubes. The cat licks the empty bowl, chases moths sportively then looks at me over her shoulder to see if I notice. I am half-menstruating, enough to spot the sheets this morning when I blearily sat on the edge of the bed and wasn’t fast enough. Stained the ivory silk gown I once fancied sexy, thrift store $2, why think of it as his when it has always been mine. In the mirror eyelids swollen mauve, face blotched, pocked and scabbed, a unhealthy pallor now used to my skin. That old conundrum: do I look objectively plainer this time of the month, or is my lowered self-esteem distorting my appearance.

I hate this and it is boring and I am keeping writing it.

I fell in love with a woman today in Target, she had an ungainly box in her red shopping trolley, one of those big reinforced cardboard boxes that doesn’t quite fit, the kind with the big copper staples, some lawn equipment or furniture that some man in her life would be putting together. But I looked and she had no wedding ring, just slender strong tanned hands which she ran over the rows of candles. I paused at a nearby end-cap display and sniffed an unscented violet pillar candle, looking artlessly the other way. She wore Teva sandals, brown canvas shorts and a red cardigan. Her hair looked like mine, shoulder-length brown highlighted blonde, but it looked healthier. She looked healthier, little muscles in her calves and forearms, creamy tanned skin. I thought, Have I just seen the woman I am meant to spend the rest of my life with? I thought, Does she look like me? Nose somewhat Roman, cheekbones strong, intelligence in her eyes and hands as she tried on sample moisturizers in the cosmetics aisle. About this time I realized I was behaving like a weirdo so I gave up on watching her and went to stand in line and buy my sheet and broken wineglasses. There’s this new thing with stemless stemware—where they try to sell you just the goblet part of the wineglass. I get this for reds, but not white, surely, where you want it to stay chilled, not warmed by the heat of your hands?

Somehow I stood right behind her in the checkout line, coincidentally. She bought the big mysterious cardboard box, a little ruffled purple bathing costume, um, swimsuit I guess we call it (Jesus I am Edwardian when I feel this lycanthropic), as for about a three-year-old girl, also a little plastic sandpail and shovel. Then she wandered out and I will never see her again.

But all day long I have been trying to write a poem about her, my alter ego, my unknown angelic beloved, like Allen Ginsberg’s Whitmanian longlong line ode/cri de coeur to the darling boys he sees in the frozen meat aisle, “A Supermarket in California“—

           I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
           I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
           I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

O beautiful woman, oh you, it is you whom my soul loveth, I have fallen in love in Target but my love does not see me, O see me, here I am, we are meant to be together and write songs and poems and make movies and quinoa salad and lie on the grass and tell stories to each other, we are meant to be each other’s other halves, feed each other strawberries and try on each other’s lipstick, oh love turn your head and see me, I am standing by the candles that make me sneeze, reading their ridiculous names (Birthday Cupcake, Angel Whispers) and wondering what your voice sounds like,—the dream of the twin, growing up with my cousin just a year and a half older than me, how we developed our code language, its secret inflections and vocabulary, I think all my female relationships since then have been compared to that with her and found wanting—do I love you because you are beautiful in yourself or because I think you look like me? Am I even more solipsistic than I have dreampt?

I half-seriously entertained walking up to her and saying, “I never do this. But I think we might have things in common, or perhaps could be friends. Here is my card if you ever want to call or go get coffee or frozen yogurt.” But then I saw the lawn furniture, and the little sandbucket with its plastic shovel. And after all her toenails were painted red and she seemed in such good shape, the way a white woman in her early forties is either already starting to give up (id est, me) or is in the best shape of her entire life.

Oh my love, there you were among the scented candles and now all is lost.

I can’t even tell you what it is I am trying so hard not to say, but it is in there. It is right up in there with being afraid that my parents are actually going to see the inside of my apartment, which means seeing all of my witchy accountrements, like Buddhist statuettes and images of various deities and Feri paraphernalia and book titles, oh dear the book titles, I have few openly sapphically incriminating ones but the pagan/witchcraft books alone would give any good Christian parent an aneurism. The best I can do is be the best daughter I can be, and hope my religion doesn’t come into it.

I’m scared to go back to Texas, from whence I fled in 1991. I admit it.

don’t take me back to the range
back to the range
I’m just coming out of the cell in my brain

The first guy I ever went out with, a nice boy from Katy, Texas, turned out to be gay. But I only found that out about a year ago. In 1986-1987 I had a massive crush on him, I think we went on like two dates and then he pretty much ditched me like he couldn’t wait to get rid of me, I was devastated and confused, and spent twenty-plus years not knowing that he’d broken up with me so preemptively because actually he didn’t like girls.

If I had known that, it would’ve helped. But maybe he didn’t know it yet.

Instead I spent all of my twenties and a good deal of my thirties determinedly reenacting that primary sexual rejection. Trying to get it to come out right each time.

The reasons change—being gay, being unable to commit to honesty—but the take-home is the same: I don’t want to touch you or be near you or call you my girlfriend. How people style it varies, but the outcome is identical.

Probably the Target woman would just invent some new elaborate system of sexual rejection. Was she pretty because she looked like my mother, like me, like my best friends? What is the mechanism of attraction? What is the will of the universe, of the power Greater than myself?

So I came home and tied my new so-called karma bracelet around my wrist. It fits there as if it had always been there. If there ever is a thirteenth lover, s/he can cut the bracelet off. Otherwise it stays there and I stay single. If nothing else, solitude sure is good for the lycanthropy. When I’m feeling jangled and unstable and a few bricks short of a load, I can stay up till half-one blogging and eating toaster waffles. I can stand in the doorway of the refrigerator and squeeze a long stripe of yellow mustard onto a slice of maple turkey and roll it up and nibble one end, giving a microscopic morsel to the cat. I don’t have to tiptoe. No one cares.

Why do I keep yelling at this blog about how I’m going to be single? I’m starting not to believe me, there’s so much repetition and vehemence.

Once again this is not a literary post.

I will therefore conclude by sharing two uselessly pretty things. Isn’t it nice that I can make myself less respectable, diluting my own ethos, by performing my gender and fetishizing illlustrations of fripperies.

First, I do think this Lancôme “L’absolu nu” lipstick looks gorgeous (pronounced GARjuss, if you are Björk; which, actually, if you really are Björk, I have a project I’d like us to do together, but anyway)—it’s so pinkly sheer and nude looking. I may have to splash out on this one next paycheck—Red Chiffon, or Rose Veil? But then there is Japan, and they need my money so much more than Lancôme does.

Then, the second pretty thing is this lovely enamelled necklace my new friend Cambria thoughtfully gave me (mine is the sunset/robin’s egg one on the left). I was blown away, and so touched by what she wrote in the card too. Isn’t it weird to be just now meeting people in time to leave? I think part of the belatedness of these friendships was my being so heterosexistly encoupled. If my ex were stilll in my life, no way would I have had a girl dance party with tequila shots and orange slices and vanilla cake decorated with blackberries. This is something it would behoove me to remember.

you had the right to cast aside what was holy.

Lie on your sofa in the fading afternoon light, savoring a tiny morsel of François Pralus Le 100% Criollo chocolate, which is, as its name would in fact indicate, 100% chocolate, which explains why it is a tiny morsel. No sugar, no dairy, no any blooming thing, just dark glossy waxy pungent heaven—sent courtesy of the charming Ms. Dianne Cowan of Cambridge, MA, who gamely engaged in chocolate swapping before it grows too hot here in Phoenix for you to put anything in the post that melts (and who further sent a bar of grainy, sugary Taza 80% Stone-Ground, in partial exchange for some locally produced, magical-herbal-essence-infused Wei Relaxed 68%).

Consider, as you allow the almost black, slightly acidic and flowery François Pralus to melt in your mouth, that what it would really be good for, would be making truffles. Decide that you have two things to celebrate—first of all, you somehow managed to get admitted to the University of Houston’s five-year PhD program, with a five-year teaching contract and various bits of financial extras; and second, you recently engaged in yet another profitless email back-and-forth with your ex, with one big difference: This time, you feel emotionally unencumbered and untortured now that it’s over. You feel, in fact, light and free. Which is probably because you know you’ll be moving away soon. Lurch up from the sofa abruptly, causing the cat to lift her head and complain.

Walk slowly into the kitchen, because both your feet are asleep, and make

IMPROMPTU MAMANESQUE MEXICAN TRUFFLES

1. Break the remaining chocolate into a small saucepan and put the heat on low. Very, very low. Cocoa butter melts at skin temperature. Do not rush this. Do not, do not.

2. Drop a good-sized chunk of unsalted pasture butter into the pan. Jab at the whole thing with a fork, sliding around the melting chocolate and remembering Maman’s wicked chocolate ice-cream sauce, which involved a whole stick of butter and an entire can of condensed sweetened milk (aka “Eagle Brand”). Remember how, whenever she was putting most of a stick of butter into something, she would say, in dulcet tones, “Look away, darling….”

(Pause for a moment, rubbing one tingling foot against the other, remembering you and Elizabeth both sneaking spoonsful of the sauce straight out of its jar in the refrigerator, without even heating it up first, much less bothering to pour it over ice cream. It melting in your mouth as you moved back to Maman’s bedroom, a brief time-out during a long day or night of nursing her as best you could, not knowing what you were doing but learning how to do it as you went, changing linens, changing wound dressings, changing meds, flushing out her J-tube, flushing out her Hickman, S-A-S-H, Saline Antibiotic Saline Heperin, flicking the bubbles out of the line because she hated to see them, flushing the blood out of the line because she hated to see it, salty-sweet almond-fragrant chocolate still melting in your mouth, soft South Texas air coming gently in at the French doors—)

3. Open the cupboard and take out the vanilla and almond flavorings, both of these now alcohol-based, since you no longer live with a recovering alcoholic and therefore no longer have to use the glycerin-based flavorings that are weak by comparison, and require about four times as much. Congratulate self on this, as well as on the fact that you can have wine with dinner and it’s no big freaking deal.

4. Go back to the cupboard for the cinnamon. Dust melting chocolate with a disappointingly small amount, and upend bottle, peering in to verify that, yes, it is all gone.

Wonder how it is that cinnamon is always purchased for you by men—this bottle having come from the boyfriend before the ex, the one who dumped you because you were too crazy for him. Or really, you were too crazy together. Which wasn’t untrue.

Remember that when you moved into the house with your ex, the one where you lived together for three years, it was a sign to you of great domestic companionship that you each had brought your cinnamon and now they would be blended. Remember photographing the two cinnamons side by side and planning to use this picture to illustrate a blogpost about the delights of harmonious cohabitation. Remember not ever writing this blogpost because you were too busy having fun living together.

Be momentarily stricken as you remember coming home the day after he had abruptly moved out without telling you and finding your cinnamon all alone in the cupboard, and feeling outraged, and thinking blindly How could he, how could he just take his cinnamon just like that, without so much as, as, as—

Decide you are going to buy your own damn cinnamon at the next available opportunity.

5. Put a frozen gordita in the toaster to toast while the chocolate melts. Eat it when it pops up even though it’s too hot and the molten refritos burn your tongue. Sniffle when the jalapeño hits your soft palate. Eat tiny bites off its edge with the chocolatey fork. Tell yourself defensively it’s like molé.

6. When the last bit of chocolate has melted, beat in the flavorings and a goodly quantity of dark organic agave nectar. Then start pouring in a thin stream of heavy cream, beating, beating, beating. Taste. Add more agave. Add more cream. Beat until the cream has turned the mahogany-black chocolate into more of a, well, chocolate brown color.

Contemplate most recent series of communications with ex, which began under the evil influence of the supermoon and went like this:

You text: I love you.
[Furtively, romantically, beneath supermoon with friends.]
He texts: I love you.
[Pause.]
He emails: Yay we can be friends!
You email: Um, not likely, for as already stated I still love you.
[Pause.]
You almost: Run into him in a parking lot.
You don’t: Speak to or look at him, but hurry past, head down. It is the closest you have been to him since last August and the breakup.
He doesn’t: Speak to you either.
You agonize: About this for several days. What if he thinks you were snubbing him! What if he’s mad at you.
Your sponsor: Tells you not to do anything.
You finally email: So, Sunday night was awkward, huh.
He emails: What are you talking about?
You think: OMG HOW FUCKING TYPICAL, I HAVE BEEN WRINGING MY HANDS FOR DAYS OVER WHETHER I HURT HIS FEELINGS, I WALKED RIGHT PAST HIM AND HE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE BECAUSE HE WAS TALKING TO A WOMAN, HA HA! HA HA! HA HA, HA HA!
[Pause.]
He emails: Blah blah blah me me me so yeah I do still love you too but hey listen [insert very fancy reasoning/mentation about why he can't be with you], in summary because I have not yet learned to tell right from wrong I therefore have no business being in a relationship with anyone at this point in my life, even though almost fifty, and also in case you hadn’t noticed me me me me me more about ME!
[Pause.]
You email: Nothing.
You start: Looking on craigslist for a flat in Houston.

Will you move August 1? It looks increasingly likely. Frankly you kind of wish you were moving tomorrow.

7. Transfer pan into the refrigerator so the truffles can start setting up. Get out Dagoba unsweetened cocoa powder to roll truffles in. Wonder how Ms. Cowan liked the Wei Relaxed.

Prop open the back door for the cat, using the empty green recycling bucket which you have had for a decade now, it being a reclaimed pickle bucket from a bagel place in Santa Fe. Wonder what it’s like to live somewhere that’s not the desert Southwest. Allow yourself to become prematurely nostalgic. Watch amused as the cat races from front door to back door, back and forth, back and forth, her claws scrabbling on the dark hardwood floor, as the sun sets and the lingering traces of chocolate cycle in your mouth through their different flavors, turning from sour and bitter to sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.

She has always been prone to worrying about things she has said in classes or at parties, subtle social slights she might have made unintentionally, tossing restlessly in bed at night wondering how she can make up such offenses without adding more or worse to them. And now she has plenty of time alone at night to think about the years she spent having sex with her lover. She remembers many times when it would start with a massage, she would give him backrubs, digging her elbows into the really knotted spots the way he liked, then at some point him flipping over and then she would, for lack of a better phrase, service him, but it didn’t feel that way, it felt like a beautiful offering, like she was doing something sacred and exciting. And then too he would crawl up on the bed between her legs, peeling down her panties and nibbling at her inner thighs and flicking his tongue in that way that made her literally feel as though she might go insane, she might be losing her mind, she might not be able to stand it but then somehow there she was crying out hoarsely, hollering coarse and loud without shame, clutching at his head as he stayed there, his mouth firm on her, not going anywhere, I am not leaving you, her hips held securely in his strong hands. And now that she has the leisure to think about all this in her solitude, she wonders and worries about it in a way that did not seem possible at the time. She worries that the giving and receiving, the giving and taking of turns, was not as mutual as it should have been, not as mutual as she thought it was, perhaps did not feel mutual to him. But she never asked him, when they were together, it was an unspoken understanding between them that their lovemaking was deeply mutual (though they never called it that, they just called it simply having sex, it seemed less romantically fraught somehow, though now as with so many things she feels differently about that, she wishes that they had called it making love). So now, she worries, was their unspoken understanding really just her misunderstanding? Had he felt resentful, neglected, put upon? If someone (neither of them, but some unimaginable neutral observer) had been keeping count, who would have been ahead? Who would have been indebted to the other? Because the pleasures seemed so inextricable—hers was his, his became hers. She decides (again and again, in her solitude, putting the question to rest only to have it come up the next time she is tired and alone) that if he felt there were some inequity in the division of labor, in the reward system, he might have told her—he might have said something, he might have asked for more attention, rather than just leaving her to wonder about it alone. It never seems to occur to her in her worrying that in fact perhaps it was she who paid an excessive amount of attention to him.

[Warning: yet another breakup post, even though I wanted to write about something else. But apparently I have bits still lodged in me that I need to cough up out of my system, shrapnel or phlegm still working loose—]

So I resist the temptation for days but finally break down, awash in premenstrual hormones and—voluptuous, glowing with concupiscence, welling over with affection and desire—text him the single word, “Love.” I sigh at myself but conclude this is harmless enough. It could be worse, anyway—if I were in my twenties I’d be showing up unannounced at his house in skimpy outfits, or calling him nineteen times daily, or god knows what else. When I obsess, I don’t do it by halves. When I love someone, I love them in that kind of frightening totality that often understandably alarms them.

The next day he sends me a brittle email in which he rather condescendingly decides that (paraphrase) “perhaps we can now be in communication without causing any harm.”

But he has misunderstood me. I don’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to send him love, which I did. And then I fell into a tempest of menstruating and weeping and impotent rage.

And frankly lists are the only way I can explain it anymore, tell anything how it is, because it’s this AND this AND this AND that AND that AND this, all those ands jostling against one another and colors blurring where objects touch each other and the swirl of it deplaning and debriding and degloving and decomposing in mid-sentence and moving on to the next, the next, the next, the next. I think for no good reason of my pink lava lamp, lumpy inside with coruscating molten emotion. I despise him AND I miss him hourly; I am disgusted with myself for still loving him AND I can’t touch myself without bursting into tears; I am enraged by his uncaring formal brittle prissy email, which reads as if composed by his robot butler, AND I wake up at three in the morning reaching for him. It’s been nearly a year. I haven’t even seen him since last August. Just how many more seasons of 30 Rock am I going to have to watch before I get over this guy? Who’s just a guy, just a forty-something guy with dumb sneakers and bad posture? Just when am I going to be done with this stupid fucking breakup already? I’m sick of it, sick of him, sick of myself. I am sickened and fuming and shaking and defeated that I am still so painfully in love with someone who clearly cares so little for me.

He thinks it would be “grounding” to talk. That it would be “helpful somehow.” My translation: “You will accept that we are better as friends and you will quit being sad and in love, and then I won’t have to feel guilty for first betraying you and then completely abandoning you.” No. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t need another friend, I have friends, and the friends I have are amazing. Be friends! the very idea is insulting. The way he addresses me, using my full name, is insulting. All along he’s kept saying this stuff, like we should spend time together because it will normalize the situation and help us accept it and and and and and. And there is nothing normal about this situation and anyway I don’t want to accept it, so fuck that noise.

I go to bed menstrual and tearful, wake at 5 a.m. in pain and the usual dramatic quantities of blood, and, half-asleep, email Exurbia Community College to say I will not appear on the 9 a.m. panel about feminism, which has a title like Why I’m Not Afraid of the F-Word. I drink cold tap water out of the bathroom sink, swallow three ibuprofen and go back to bed, wake at nearly noon and read his email, eat a handful of almonds and one of blueberries, seething but not even knowing it. Drive to teach, crack jokes with my students and push them as hard as I can for an hour and a half, drive home, eat leftovers, still don’t know I’m angry until finally I talk to my best friend and suddenly am yelling into the phone, to my surprise.

Me: Why am I the one left holding the bag? Why does he get a free pass out of this?
S: You can’t know that—you don’t know what’s going on with him.
Me: But why am I the one who can’t stand the idea of being friends? Why am I the one writing all the poems? Why am I the one reaching for him in my sleep at 3 a.m.?
S: Because he’s probably playing poker at 3 a.m. He’s an addict. He’s doing what he does.
Me: Then why do I still love him?
S: Because you do.
Me [yelling now]: I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF IT.
S: Yes, you are.
Me [yelling and crying]: BUT I STILL LOVE HIM.
S: Yes, you do.

Then I went to therapy where I repeated this messy stichomythia, Lauren making me FEEL MY FEELINGS and all kinds of crazy outrageous UNSEEMLY shit like that. I demonstrated the waking-at-three-a.m.-wrapping-my-arms-around-air maneuver, laughing, and she told me that made her feel really sad. Then I started to cry. We’re like that.

The thing I am grateful for, through all this, is that it can be both/and instead of either/or. I miss him and think of him constantly, AND I am able to go to Giuseppe’s with Beth and have amazing gluten-free fettuccini al salmone with asparagus tips and that gorgeous soft house Chardonnay of theirs, which is like a pale golden Vermeer-colored light reaching down into my soul and illuminating the dark corners. I reach for him in my sleep and wake myself up grabbing air, AND I turn over and pet the cat, keeping her eternal vigilant post at the window, guarding us from hobgoblins all night long, the breeze from the window ruffling her hair, and she mrrrtles a little at my touch but doesn’t turn her eyes away from her watch.

The catalogue, in short, it is saving me. Fiery longing can coexist, and quite companionably it turns out, next to curiosity, interest in frozen cherry and almond milk smoothies, and the ability to mail poems to literary magazines, to read submissions for our literary magazine, to comment on papers, to read Chaucer and Whitman, to play Scrabble, to sit in the grass with the cat, or curl up with her under the yellow quilt, to watch Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr and to worry about my hair (the break-up induced blonde highlights are growing out, and I can’t decide if I should color them back to brunette).

As long as I accept my fundamental shallowness and my insistence on having chocolate with breakfast, I should be fine.

Finally, for your entertainment or maybe mine, an email to my beloved BFF, who’s a Zen priest and therefore knows the story to which I’m referring:

I finally figured out, 24 hours later, why I’m so irritated by his wooden email. It reminds me of that story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones where an old lady has been supporting a monk for all these years and she wants to test his Zen, so she sends him the young lady “rich in desire”? And he says something pompous and frigid and condescending and turns down the young lady? And the old lady BURNS HIS STUPID MONK-HUT DOWN HAHAHAHA because he was such a self-righteous ice cube.

That’s why this email chaps me so. Because after ALL THESE YEARS does he not know me but at all, that he’s all using the passive voice and being formal and standoffish and prudish and I TEXTED HIM THE WORD LOVE and his is not an appropriate response to love. And yes, as the Zen people say, the practice of a lifetime is the appropriate response.

But, okay, I will level with you, and then I swear this will be the end of this ridiculous post—it’s spring break, this next week is spring break, and last year we went to Tucson and Madera Canyon and we fought the first day (a bad fight, I had to ask him to let me out of the car and walked for a few minutes alone, looking up at the moon and asking her for strength as tears rolled down my face and he followed me in the car), but after that we actually had a wonderful time, intimate and close, and it’s all too easy for me to romanticize it, the hummingbirds at our window every morning, the dinners we made in the cabin’s tiny kitchen, the hikes walking hand in hand.

And, that was a year ago and this year he’s going to Texas and New Mexico alone, and that’s just how it is. So I’ve got to plan as many nice things for myself this week as possible, as many ANDs as I can fit in. Yoga four days this week, that’s without doubt. Maybe a Scrabble evening with friends, definitely working on new poems with my silly but fun new marker/ posterboard system, hanging out with Alison who’s here with her family from New Mexico, watching season five of The Wire, keeping myself busy and happy and distracted even as the ringing AND of loss and longing still sounds down in the marrow of my bones.

[Best Marlo Stanfield quotation from season four: "You want it to be one way...but it's the other way." Yeah. You're not kidding.]

in which the abandoned row houses are also characters