So just, fair warning, so none of this is probably going to make any sense. But I’m okay with that if you’re okay with it. Well, or even if you’re not I’m okay with it, because I’m moving, so as far as I’m concerned for the next two to four weeks I get a free pass on everything.
This morning, wrapping the wineglasses in bubblewrap and putting them in their box and knowing, knowing as I did so that at least one of them will break en route anyway, I thought: My only goal should be to get through all this without freaking out. That’s my new goal. Not to move perfectly—not to save all the right things, get rid of all the right things, pay as little money as possible, and execute all plans flawlessly—but to do this move without anxiety attacks, panic attacks, or meltdowns. I decided: I will move house as though it’s the easiest thing in the world, as though it’s all going completely smoothly, as though I already know everything is going to be fine—because actually honestly it really is no big deal. I’m moved dozens of times, twice overseas and several times coast-to-coast. And right now I live in a 400 sf casita and I’m moving to an 800 sf carriage house, so I know everything will fit; I can afford movers; I’ve already started getting rid of lots of stuff and anyway the movers quoted me $1890 without my bed and you know I think I’ll take my bed after all cos I really really love it and once I get there I’ll buy these red chairs and a bright new rug, which I have money to do; and this is not like when I was 19 and had to move by mailing everything to myself book-rate and having half of it crushed when it falls off the truck in Albuquerque, and everything is just going to be totally fucking fine.
Now how simple was that? Just decide not to worry! Sometimes my bright ideas come slowly, but when they finally dawn, how light, how freeing. And, even if I do freak out at some point along the way, that’ll be okay too, because everything associated with this move is going to be fine. Including small transient meltdowns.
Anyway that’s how I felt while wrapping the wineglasses this morning.
Whereas last night, last night I was suddenly seized with a great and furious storm of energy, and I plowed through my filing cabinet like a young farmer through the fertile springtime loam, verily, and I threw away four enormous wastebaskets full of paper. And I mean so full, I had to carry them out to the recycling bin with both hands, puffing and struggling. I threw away utilities receipts (who even has those anymore?!), ancient tax returns (hello 1991!), wads of evidently meaningless Social Security paperwork, reams of student papers, attendance sheets—I threw away entire websites that I’d printed out in the nineties, before anyone understood quite how the webbernets was going to work—I threw out papers from when I lived in Santa Fe, papers from when I lived in Boston. Then I cleaned out all four desk drawers, mercilessly. The one exception I made was poem drafts, prose drafts. I save all drafts, always, superstitiously, in case I never write again (so I can just crawl back through them and salvage something? I don’t know. Someday I’ll have to examine this particular form of clinging, but not this time).
When I was done all of my remaining papers actually fit in the filing cabinet, something that hasn’t been true since approximately, um, 1999. I was flushed and triumphant, and it also successfully messed with the identity which I have unconsciously half-adopted, partially foisted upon me by others, but at least half-created by myself—the identity of packrat, hoarder, disposophobe. I’m not a hoarder, I realized. I am able to let go of things that no longer serve any purpose. I keep my (dozens of) journals and (hundreds of) drafts, and I keep boxes of fabric, because I am a writer and an artist. But I am not someone who hangs on to paid utility bills or freelance receipts from 2002 or even my divorce papers (apparently, because I looked for them but can no longer find them—or my marriage certificate—though presumably that’s okay because they cancel each other out).
It was wildly liberating and actually made me excited to get rid of more things. I’ve asked Beth to come over sometime this week and help me with my clothes closet, which is already pretty pared down, but I still have dresses I love that fit me perfectly a year ago, when I was an XS, but don’t fit me now that I’m a generous M, and I think all that stuff should fly away into the night as well. Letting go, letting go. It’s just like all the cheesy life-coach type folks say: You have to release old energy to make room for new.
It’s also become clear that I really didn’t have the chance to do most of this last year because I moved under such pressure, pressure both emotional and temporal, after several weeks of my ex and I floundering around not making up our minds about what was going to happen. When I went over to our house one day to pick up some mail and clothes, and saw that he’d moved out, I was stunned. Then I still had to clean out the apartment where I was temporarily staying, fly to Texas and drive back the car, get my own stuff packed and move out of our house—there just wasn’t time, and I was in too much shock and grief to cope with it anyway. I pretty much just dragged everything to the casita unexamined and hid it under the bed/in the closet and then collapsed face-first into a large coconut flan.
So now I’m dealing with a lot of the letting-go that I didn’t get to do a year ago. It feels wonderful, and I’m grateful I get to do it this time.
In other news, my blog is no longer completely ausgefucked. I had to downgrade from the new improved WordPress 3.2.1 back to the old unimproved 3.1.4, but at least I can upload pictures and videos without having to code by hand, which I seem to have become too lazy to do.
So, to celebrate the return of instantly uploaded images, here is a Roborovski hamster. I’m kind of obsessed with them, for obvious reasons. I wondered to my best friend if Pyewacket would let me have one, and she replied promptly, “I think she would let you have a whole handful. Like popcorn.”
Inevitably there are other kinds of letting go, too.
A few days ago I threw on one of my two sundresses, this summer’s uniform—not the lavender dress, which is cuter, but the more practical tea-with-cream colored one—and drove to the post office to send my lease and August rent check to Houston via certified mail.
(Standing in line, my strategy of wearing no underpants all summer revealed its problematic aspects: a long bead of sweat trickled elaborately down the inside of my thigh all the way to my ankle, completely unimpeded, as I did my best to look ahead blankly and ignore it.)
On the way back I passed Ranch Market, the local Mexican grocery store, although to say “grocery store” really does not do its comprehensive magnificence full justice; and I randomly decided to stop and get paletas. I discovered Ranch Market last year immediately after the breakup, and at the time couldn’t even go inside without being overwhelmed with longing for my ex and imaginings of how much he’d love it.
But this time I went in more or less cheerfully and emerged very much the same, feeling wistfulness and regret and yearning without feeling debilitated by them. Actually the first thing I saw were these whole sugar-candied peras y duraznos, whole round entire frutas in rows with little green stems reattached, faintly dusted with crystalline sugar (looking a little bit like this—at least this is the closest picture I could find, I think they’re more common in Spain than in Mexico), and I just immediately thought OMG FARREN WOULD LOVE THEM and after that I was okay.
Then I found the paletas, including a tamarind kind with chile (which I was not adventurous enough to try, but knew she would be); and again I was okay. Not saturated with those razory shards of longing like fiberglass that has worked its way under your skin and now must work its way back out again (so pink and innocent and fluffy-looking, that fiberglass! I grew up in a house where it was still exposed, and the mice would build nests in it for their young, and I would marvel how the tiny defenseless babies were apparently unhurt by the spun glass which made my skin itchy and red wherever I accidentally touched it).
I looked at paletas and felt wistful but not devastated, and picked out three kinds: mango y fresa y coco, including a giant push-up pop made by La Michoacán which honestly kind of resembled an enormous penis but promised to be a very creamy coconut untainted with chewy thready shreds of the stuff, which is a Thing for me. (It’s all about texture, sometimes.)
And then at the last minute, on my way out, I was ambushed by a bright display of his favorite sodas: manzanita, jamaica, piña, guyaba. And I remembered buying aguacate paletas that second summer in Santa Fe, filthy from a desert hike, licking the the last bit of milky green sweetness off the splintery stick before collapsing laughing into bed, grit in my hair, in my socks, even in my underpants, passing out, and then waking up later in the dark to make love.
Like the lady in the song says, I don’t think I can ever go to Mexico again. But that’s okay, because I have Italy and France; and because at least I’ve been, which is more than I could have said five years ago. Maybe someday I’ll meet the person who wants to drive to Guatemala with me, since he can’t. Since he won’t.
I stood there for a long moment, looking at the bright artificially colored sodas. Then I got in line and bought my paletas and hurried out to the car before they melted, humming. And laughing to myself, remembering an exchange I once had with my friend Brian, who understands most things I am saying almost before I am finished saying them, e.g.:
Me [on the topic of teaching post-apocalyptic fiction]: …and so the only other narrative that’s even remotely by a writer of color is this terrible novel by Marge Piercy. And I can’t use that, because Piercy’s, like, a Brooklyn Jew, but she writes it first-person from the point of view of a Hispanic cleaning lady, which is just…it’s just really, really unfortunate.
Brian [nods sympathetically, quoting imaginary line of dialogue from novel, with appropriate hand gestures]: “Aiiieee!”
(And the roasted green chiles of course. I stop in my tracks, pulling down my sunglasses so I can devour them with my eyes all the more ravenously. The young guy tending the roasters tries to sell me a chicken, but I’m standing downwind so I can huff the burnt pepper smell. He doesn’t know I’m a homesick New Mexican. Peppers in July! Truly the Arizona climate is rostizado. My paletas are melting. I shove my sunglasses back over my eyes like a detoxing celebrity and walk to the car, my two-toned ghetto car. Rancho Mercado has been five blocks from my house all year and I haven’t even been able to set foot in there, except now, when the need for creamy mango paletas finally drove me to it. Will the smell of fresh corn tortillas always break my heart? Yes. A little bit, it always will.
(And how still, when I try to have sexy time with myself, I end up sobbing. But that’s okay, because at least now I laugh too, and cradle myself a little, and say yes, yes you knew this would happen, it always ends this way right now, right now it’s okay to still love him, it’s okay to still miss him and want him, it won’t be this way forever, let’s go get a coconut paleta.
(And I sniffle, and smile, and the cat bats at my bare calf with her velveted paw when I walk past, turning her belly up for petting and kisses; she lets me pet her stomach now, freely, a new gesture of trust. A new permission she has granted me suddenly, for no apparent reason.
(Paletas it turns out are pretty good at three in the morning, with tears drying on your cheeks.)
***
It’s now two days later. Or three, I forget which. But this is from about a week ago:
Playing feather with the cat, I hide around a corner and pop out to scare her; but I scare her too successfully, and she just has time to give me a reproachful look before scurrying to hide under the couch, refusing to come out (though her little black paw flashes out to bat at the feather).
In a desperate lather to do something, anything, toward the horrifying masses of sorting/packing/discarding that must be started suddenly soon NOW, I do the first thing I can think of to do: take all the pictures off the walls, which immediately look bare and awful. I stack them in the hallway, to Pyewacket’s disapproval. Good, I think grimly. We’re moving! It’s going to look like this, and for several weeks. It’s okay. This is what it’s supposed to look like. Next I turn to the refrigerator and take down all the postcards and fancy magnets. A year’s worth of movie stubs: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Never Let Me Go, True Grit, Black Swan, Bridesmaids, Tree of Life. I remember the friends I went with, in most cases, more than the films.
The last thing left on the fridge is a mag poem I created at our old place, made entirely out of the stray random words I found down in the dirt when I’d mow the lawn, someone’s lost or discarded magnetic words. I decide to throw the poem-fragment away, but first I will record it here for you, because it rhymes and is almost metrical, and I was foolishly proud of it:
Wee Reason Beauty
Prance Boohoo
Want Now Know Hard
Psychiatrist Timbuktu
Well, okay, the second line is hypometrical, but I did find these words literally half-buried in the mud, so, you know—
That was then, but what can I tell you about today? That I finally did my Step Four with my sponsor, which I guess is really Step Five, admitting to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs? These character defects, or places where I defect from my character, have revealed themselves mostly (so far, in my case) to be crippling fear and a deeply rooted belief in my own inadequacy/weirdness/unloveability/alienation. We finish our stepwork quite calmly, without any grandiose ritual. I hop in the car and drive to Mesa to unlock the meeting room and set up beforehand (I’m serving this month as keyholder): we have a meeting, I put all the literature away and lock up again and come home and am actually halfway through a leftover shrimp taco with cilantro cream when I am accosted by the thought: I’m ready to meet with my ex and hear his amends.
I’d be more surprised but was half expecting something like this. It’s in the nature of stepwork to offer these unexpected shifts in perception and acceptance. That’s just one way in which, however hokey this shit is, it actually works. I don’t want to mislead myself, though, so to run this new assurance past someone, I call Alabama to double-check. Shaking my head at my own mercurial reversal, and rinsing cilantro cream driblets off the styrofoam takeout box so I can recycle it.
She’s awake until midnight; answers on the first ring. “Alabama Baker!”
“Alabama, hi.” I give my first name and 12-step affiliation. “How are you?”
“I’m good, sweetheart. How are you? Remind me what’s going on.”
“Well, I’m honestly kind of stuck. It’s just—so my ex asked if we could get together so he can make amends, and I haven’t been able to decide. I go to bed feeling one way and wake up feeling the exact opposite. I told him three weeks ago I’d let him know but I can’t make up my mind. And now part of me thinks—I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s the right thing to do.”
I hear her lighting a cigarette, then a long exhale. “Honey, I’m going to be completely blunt with you now. Can you handle it? Because recently someone from your program told me I’m being too harsh. She said—and this is someone with years of recovery!—she said, we’re not savages running around with hatchets and spears, you know!”
I stifle my laughter. “No, Alabama, it’s fine—that’s why I’m calling you. I want your opinion.”
“In that case, honey, I’ll tell you what. I think you should look at this as an opportunity. God’s giving you a chance to make your amends to him, too.”
There is a long pause.
“And get it over with. Get OVER it! So that when you move, you can really put it behind you this time and start over, and stop hanging on. Stop hanging onto him.”
Oh God, my brain thinks automatically. This again. I’m hanging on to him? Make my amends? What the hell did I do that I should be sorry for?! That defensiveness. But actually at this point, especially post-Step Four, I know exactly what I did.
“So can I make amends for being an enabler? For tolerating unacceptable behavior?”
She laughs, a short bark. “You’d damn well better. Enabling someone is a death-row sentence! It’s like a long, drawn-out execution.”
I think back on my last year with my ex. This isn’t a bad description. The months and months we dragged along as I fearfully cosigned acres and acres of bullshit, afraid of his rage if I confronted him, afraid of losing him, afraid of having to move and uproot my entire life in my last year of grad school, afraid I would lose my mind. When by trying to stay I came dangerously close to losing it anyway.
Her cough reels me back into the present, to her voice on the phone. “I was afraid, Alabama. That was my part in it.”
“And guess what, that’s all you have to say. Don’t make it fancy. Keep it simple. Just say: I wronged you by being fearful; please forgive me. That’s it. End of conversation. You don’t go into all the details, this time I did this and that time I did that. It should take ten minutes at most.” She tells a story about driving five hours to make amends to an ex, spending fifteen minutes with him in a restaurant, then driving five hours home again. “And I don’t know if you’ll be friends afterward. My ex-husband and I aren’t friends. But you’ll have made your amends.”
“It sounds fine now, Alabama, but—I mean, when I’m talking to you and I’m safe at home alone this all seems possible. But what if I screw up? What if he starts lying and I get angry again, or what if I start crying—”
“If you try to do this alone, I guarantee you’ll fuck it up. You have to get prayed up before you go in there. You don’t do it—you turn it over and your Higher Power does it.”
I mechanically quote from the Third Step prayer: “…to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt.”
“That’s right. You’ve turned your life and your will over to the care of God. And if you can see your ex for what he is—a sick fucking puppy—you won’t get angry.”
“Like that part in the Big Book about how they are very sick men?”
“That’s called the Resentment Prayer. But don’t forget, you have to quote the whole thing.” She recites the passage from memory, 36 years sober:
We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. [Emphasis Alabama's.] We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry.”
I laugh with relief at the familiarity; as she says the words I can picture them in my handwriting, purple ink on a little square of lilac-colored paper. “You know what’s funny, Alabama? Even before I came into program I had that written down on a piece of paper, and I kept it in my office. And I would say it sometimes every fifteen minutes, through gritted teeth: God save me from being angry.”
“Well, because we’re all sick puppies. You can only recognize his behavior because it’s inside you too.”
Again, this isn’t something I could have heard a year ago. I was too indignant. But I know what she’s saying—that the same fear, the same self-seeking, the same dishonesty, drive my behaviors as they do his. It’s just that mine take different forms. I get scared and I hang on more and more tightly and lie about how hurt and upset I am. Whereas he—well, it doesn’t really matter what he does, or why.
Alabama reads my mind, as is her habit. “It doesn’t matter how well he does his amends or even what he says. You’re there to do your amends, so you can put this behind you and get on with your life.” I don’t tell her that one of my biggest fears is that he’ll lie to my face again, and now that I’m able to tell, I’ll have to sit there and listen to more of his confabulation and taildragging. But I guess if this happens and I don’t want to sit through it, I can always just stand up and leave.
“I think it’s partly been so hard for me to let go, because he still says stuff that’s confusing. He said in his email that he can’t imagine his life with me, but he also can’t imagine it without me. Stuff like that.”
“But you have to live your life without him.”
“Every day. What other choice do I have?”
She sighs. “You know, I’m telling you some harsh truths, and I’m sorry. You let me know me if I’m being too rough. But this is how it is. You have to forgive someone before you can make amends to them. You’ve got to understand that if he could have done it any different, he would have. Forgive him. Stop blaming him. He did the best he could do. He’s a poor, sick motherfucker.”
Tears prick in my eyes, sting my nose. I know this is true. I’ve thought it myself. If he could have stayed with me, he would have. He wanted so badly to be a good partner, but he literally was incapable of being in an intimate relationship without sabotaging it and hurting both of us grievously in the process.
“And forgiveness,” she goes on, “here’s the secret about forgiveness: It’s not a feeling. It’s not an action. It’s a choice. Forgiveness is a choice you make to stop blaming someone. That’s all it is. The cessation of blaming.”
“Honey, let me tell you a story about my brother-in-law. I hated that bastard so much I shot him.”
I think I’m not quite hearing right. “You what?”
“That’s right, I shot him. Shot him in the ass!” She laughs uproariously, as though she has said something hilarious. “I’m a good shot too. Meant to shoot his dick off, but would you believe, at the last minute the son of a bitch turned sideways, and I shot him in the ass? Right through both ass cheeks! I’ll tell you, he was mad.”
Sometimes I don’t understand why Alabama isn’t in prison. “So, um, so why—”
“Because he screwed around on my sister! And I told him, I warned that motherfucker that if he did it again I’d shoot his dick off.” This is turning into an episode of Deadwood. Suddenly Alabama is emotional, her voice cracks and veers. “But why was I even doing that? Why wasn’t I comforting my sister? Why was I messing around with that son of a bitch instead?!” She’s quiet for a long moment, obviously in tears.
“So I’ll tell you honey. When I did my first inventory, I didn’t make any amends to him. I thought, I’m still mad at him and I’m sure as hell not going to make any amends. And with my second inventory, same thing. He didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to him. That’s how it was.
“But you know what happened? I was about ten years sober when my sister committed suicide. And my whole family blamed him. Said it was his fault. Well, it wasn’t his fault; she was always cowardly that way.”
In my head I have to gently massage and rearrange what Alabama has said to sound more like what I know she really means: Her sister’s character defects included crippling fear and self-hatred, and these had nothing to do with her husband’s bad behavior. Only that, like me perhaps, she was maybe too scared to leave him, or unable to be honest with herself about how badly it was affecting her, until it was too late.
“I called him and said I wanted to talk to him. He said okay; probably figured I was coming over to chew him out just like every other family member. Instead I made amends. Ten minutes. Just, please forgive me for my part in that. And do you know what happened?” She continues without pausing. “My son, my boy that was killed in the war—he was able to develop a beautiful relationship with his uncle. That man was the father he never had—was a warm, affectionate, good father to him, before he died. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made amends.”
I know what she’s saying. “I guess I was just waiting to feel forgiveness naturally, after more time had passed. I was going to wait until I stopped being angry and full of blame, and then make amends.”
She coughs her horrible liquid cough. “Honey, if I wanted for that kind of thing to happen naturally, I’d be waiting a long time, because I am completely full-of-shit crazy. I’m crazy! Crazy!”
I can’t help but laugh. “I know, I’m crazy too, but I think it would happen eventually, because it usually does. I just never thought that I could—make it happen sooner.”
“You’re not making it happen, God is. You’re just being honest, open-minded and willing. Now will you call afterward and let me know how it turns out?”
“Of course I will.”
I hang up and write my ex a brief, simple email, almost unthinkingly, after composing elaborate tortuous bullet-pointed blame-driving ones in my head for the last three weeks (mostly laboriously and snidely correcting all the partial truths and misunderstandings of his last message). I get the auto-reply immediately: he’s travelling and away from email and cellphone until the end of July. Of course—I haven’t seen his car at meetings the last two weeks. He’s probably in Mexico. Alabama calls back immediately.
“Honey, I forgot to tell you, he’s in Mexico. May not be back before you leave.”
When you do stuff in alignment with the fairies, you don’t have to toil and wrangle, it’s just right there. “I know, Alabama. It’s okay. It’ll either happen or it won’t. I love you.”
And then I have half a coconut-penis paleta, and I write this for you. And now it’s two a.m. and I post it.
I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, much less what’ll happen before moving day two weeks from now. I know there’s dishes to wash and books to cull and phone calls to make; I know I somehow have to sell a washing machine (craigslist?) and convince my moving company to let me bring along my mattresses. I know the cat needs a haircut, the basil needs transplanting, and Beth and I need to run on treadmills until our faces turn pink and our hair is sweaty. I know my ex is somewhere in Baja, maybe at our favorite beach, maybe drinking a manzanita soda, maybe asleep, maybe talking to a new friend, maybe outside the tent looking at the stars and peeing in the sand and remembering the silly names we made up for the constellations: Tostilocos, Hello Kitty, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin. For the first time in almost a year, just when I thought I would never be at peace with this, with his continuing his life without me, I almost don’t mind. For maybe the first time it all feels just slightly more beautiful and sweet than it does horrifying and tragic. It’s been some of both for many months now; but maybe something in the ratio has finally shifted. I’m glad he’s in Mexico. At least one of us is enjoying our favorite coastline along the Cortéz, and the little stand where you can buy the best, freshest fish tacos along the entire peninsula for just $1 each, and squeeze tiny limes and drizzle aguacate sauce over them—Taquería Gayro, the same falling-down stand where we once ate half a dozen shrimp tacos apiece and then went back to our tent and collapsed from the joy of it. The soft lap-lap the waves make at night along the tideline, and the pfft-pfft of dolphins breathing right offshore.
And I have my own places to travel, my own new friends to meet, my own constellations to name. This isn’t the way I wanted it to be, this isn’t how I wanted our five years to end; but this is how it is. This is what he chose. He took his shot, he had his chance, and this is how it ended. But it’s not going to be the end of my life. It can’t be. I loved him too much for that.
So in the words of another fiercely beautiful woman: I’ll just keep on being awesome over here.
