Novel Sampler: The Vehicle

I'm working on my Young Adult Novel. Here's a sneak peak, let me know what you think (the short story with all the sex and the f-bombs is taking longer for me to get to you than I'd hoped)..

When Charlie and I come up on The Institute, I am heaving and nearly out of breath. It was longer than I thought it would be getting here, and tougher going. Three miles at least, and all uphill. I’m used to riding my bike everywhere, even in winter. But I’m used to riding alone. Keeping pace with someone else is tricky. I can hold my own with Henry, but I don’t know Charlie as much. When he hops off his beaten bike and makes his way up the stony driveway, I let him know.

“On the way back, I’m leading,” I say. He turns and gives me half a nod. Whether he means it or not, I don’t know. He’s the one with the power, he’s the one who can let us into The Institute. He’s the one who can get us into his dad’s files, and my mom’s. But I will be the one to lead us out of here, whether he likes it or not.

The Institute looks like The White House. It is big, looming, white. There are columns and big windows that you can’t see into. There are long trimmed hedges on each side so that in the summer during exhibits, kids and their parents can line up. Today, those hedges look scraggly, and there are bits of trash clinging to the bare branches. The Institute is closed for the season, and probably even for the workers since its Sunday.

I think, there is nothing good about Sundays in winter. Nothing at all.

We’ve grown up knowing The Institute as the most important building—well, the most important thing of all—about our small town. There’s nothing else here. It’s a museum, it’s a research center, and it’s what we are famous for. Some old rich guy started it something like a hundred years ago, and to me, that might as well be the beginning of time. I have never been in The Institute without a tour group, and even when we go in and see the biological exhibits with the dead stuffed cougars and birds, or the anthropological ones where the weird plastic models of cavemen are frozen in the act of throwing a spear, I have never been to the back half, where the curators and the scientists and the researchers sit in silence and do their work. This was where my mom went almost every day before her assignment to Pompeii. Charlie can get us in, and I need to see the file of her mission there.

I walk to the front door but Charlie darts fast to the side of the building, and when I start to protest he hushes me fast. I shut my big mouth. I don’t do that often.
His black hair looks nearly blue in the bald winter light. His face is red and he puts his finger to his lips. I run up next to him so fast I bump into him hard and feel the scratch of his wool jacket against my hands.

“Sorry,” I mumble. And he hushes me again.

On the side of The Institute is a less grand entrance. A brown door, scratched and small, with a key pad where you punch in numbers to a code. Charlie works his fingers on the code quickly.

“Why don’t you tell me what it is? I should know, if we come back.”

Charlie looks at me gravely. “We’re not coming back, Kate.”

We push through the door, almost together because I shove myself along with Charlie’s movements. It’s dark, and it takes a while for me to see what we are looking at. Then, Charlie flips on a spotty florescent light that buzzes like that wasp’s nest Henry and I knocked down last summer. He had told me not to hit it, but I did it anyway. When it happened, he yelled at me to run, and I did. He ran faster, and I almost made it. One wasp caught up with me and stung me once in my right knee and as I fell, on my left cheek. I remember picking myself up, tears streaming from my face as I swelled up, and then when I saw Henry, stopping immediately. He saw I was red and asked if I was okay. And I put my hand to my face like he had been the one to point it out, and faked a laugh. Oh, did I get stung, I said. I didn’t notice. Henry gave me his portion of ice cream that night. He never called me out on it, he never ratted on me. I have been avoiding losing Mom for nearly a year. But if I lose Henry too, my heart will break for good. I sniff once and don’t think about Henry again. I think about defeating The Vehicle. Once I do that, I can think about saving everyone else. Even me.

What I see when the light is on is miles. Miles and miles of filing cabinets, stacked high and in many long rows. They are not marked. Not by date, not by project or name. I start walking anyway. I figure I will have to walk up and down each aisle, and look at the top file and the bottom file in the row to figure out the pattern of what is categorized and why. I pull open the first one in our aisle. I scan it quickly. It’s about the history about the domestication of grain. The bottom one is about computer chips. I soldier on, pulling papers out, reading them quick, and then laying them back in very carefully. This goes on for a good half hour. Finally, I look up at Charlie, who is leaned up against the wall and looking very amused at my frantic reading.

“What we need is in my dad’s office.”

“Stop playing games, Charlie.”

“I’m not, I just knew you wouldn’t go there without looking at this first.”

“How do you know what I would and wouldn’t do?” I slam a cabinet shut. “You don’t know anything about me.” Immediately, I am sorry for saying this. I am often sorry for saying every little thing that comes into my mind. But Charlie is still smiling. He’s not offended at all.

“No Filter Kate, that’s what I’m going to call you from now on.”

“Dead Man Charlie, that’s what you'll be if you don’t cut the crap.”

Charlie stops smiling and sighs. “This way.”

We wind through several more aisles of several more beige filing cabinets. It could be a library, it could be a morgue. There is nothing special about anything here, except for what could lie inside.

At the far end of the room, Charlie takes a sharp right, again to another door. I think about asking him how much time he has spent here, alone and learning all the ins and outs. Maybe it’s as much time as I have spent with Henry in the woods, or alone in the woods. Or at The Site. Charlie is moving through everything as if his eyes are closed, just like I can do in those other places. Meanwhile I bump into corners and fall into him again at the next door. He punches in another code, and when we walk through, we find another world.

It is bright white, a laboratory, and cluttered as if we are in the middle of a big crowd. There are desks overflowing with file folders and papers, corkboards with pushpins of swatches of colors, glass containers of different colored powders—some look like glittering gems, others like dirt—and random piles of the most glorious materials I have ever seen. There are bones, tusks, skulls of monkeys and birds. I want to touch them, but I can’t disturb them. There are tattered rugs with patterns that I recognize as Navaho, broken pieces of carvings that I can tell are Incan, papery scrolls with cryptic and beautiful writing that I know is Egyptian, big fat cubes of rock that have cave paintings—monoliths, they are called—with running buffalo. There are vials of water, or what looks like water. Vials of what looks like blood. Amber chunks of resin with trapped mosquitos. Charlie had been holding my hand as we walked through to here but I drop quietly and I stare. This sight is what my Site should have been. Could have been. Suddenly, The Site seems so childish. For kids. And I’m not a kid. Even if I was when this began, I’ll never be a kid again. The treasures here are too many to count, and they are unguarded, and I know that the answer to the Curse of Pompeii, and the curse that The Vehicle is now bringing upon us is here. If only we can find it.

“My dad’s desk is back here,” Charlie says, and walks away, though I can barely follow him as I take in more bounty. Pinned butterflies, more beautiful and in unbroken glass, unlike the only one I have. Beaded jewelry from tribes long gone. Rocks of all kinds—sedimentary, metamorphic, and the most important of all, igneous. The Bravery was once a tongue, but now it is petrified not unlike an igneous rock. Of course it would be igneous. It was transformed in the volcano of Mount Vesuvius. It was supposed to protect whoever had it. And now, it has transformed The Vehicle into a monster, and I don’t know why.

Right before Charlie’s dad’s desk, I stop. Here is the most amazing thing of all: a full-grown lioness, stuffed and mounted. She is incredible, and I am sad that the only way I can get this close to her is because she is long dead. I look at her yellow eyes, the way the fur becomes whitish around her plasticized nose, her fangs out and the position she has been wrangled into—as if she is running, as if she is about to charge, as if she could get away.

“Kate, hurry!”

I take a moment to look deep into her glass eyes and feel as though I can see her even though she will never see me. And then I look at the rest of her. What I see is terrible, her fur is worn and ragged. Faded. She looks so old on part of her and so young on the rest. It’s as if part of her has been in the light, and part of her has been in the dark and she has aged horribly because of it. Though I don’t know which it is.

“What is this? Why is she like this?” I ask Charlie.

“It’s nothing, they have to restore it. Under the lights of the display case, the animals fade to nearly nothing. It’s being painted, it’s being repaired, more of its natural body is being torn away and they’re painting the fur. It’s the price of being able to look at it, I guess.”

“But she’s barely real at all any more.” I say this and it comes out with great sadness.

My Blog, My Self

Is there anybody out there? I honestly forgot this blog existed. Did you? Remember when I was good to you? I am still good, I hope. But it is not to you at the moment, Almost Literary. I am in school and writing two novels (this I would recommend to no one, do as I say and not as I do, friends) and I have two full time jobs and I am writing a short story, which is full of bad words, namely the word "fuck," and sex, which I am so uncomfortable writing about but very comfortable having (tell no one) and though I say or do something all the time, to write it is different, so very different. How strange that my writing is more intimate than my actual life.

Because my writing is what is inside. The best. The worst. What I am and what I do can be forgotten after a few glasses of champagne or months away, but what I write, that is here for good. It will be here after I'm dead. If anyone cares, that is another point entirely. If I write something good enough, it will mean more than my life ever could. So silly, I am. I love art. I lack the talent to be an artist without working so hard and trying and sweating and screaming. I want, so bad. I have almost enough talent. But I do not have enough. I never will. And the worst part? I will not stop, because what I have plenty of is ambition. I am stubborn, a mule. I will not, I can not. This is the only thing that I can't stop doing. Tell me to never eat ice cream again? No problem. Tell me that yoga causes lymphoma? I shall stop. But writing, it is the thing that will kill me, because it is what I love, and it does not love me back, and yet I still come after it. I won't stop. It will be the end of me, and I'm glad that I know how I will go. It brings me peace. Until then, it's just fury at the computer, at the page. Not yet, it's not yet. What is in my mind is so much better than my output. And still, and still.

It is only with volume that I can ever get close to where I need to be. Buried under documents, clutching my macbook and with labored breathing go, just go.

When this short story is done, I will post it for you in the next week or so. It says "fuck." Be forewarned.

On A Break-Up : Quote of the Year

"You want to stay? That’s staying out of convenience. Because if you stay, and for as long as you stay in this home, my home, then all the things you said will be just that. What you said. But when you leave, they will immediately become what you did. And you will have forever done it."

The Last Essay I Ever Wrote For Applications

When you go do it like this, they know you're spent. 13 down, no more to go, sorry Columbia, for this:


Dear Columbia University

When I started my critical paper for entrance to your program, I began to cheat. I had in my possession a gently-worn copy of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. It’s edged in red and white, and still bears the purchase sticker from where I bought it (Borders on the Upper West Side, a steal at fifteen dollars plus tax). I adore it. But more, it was published in the past ten years, and in my genre—fiction! I told this to myself as I happily re-read on the lurching subway, fingering the pages, trying to be stoic when I felt the pangs her sentences invoked. I formulated grand plans. And then I re-read your clearly printed instructions on what we were to write.

Alas, the stories in the first three quarters of the book were not published in the last ten years, never mind written then, and so they could not count. What she wrote which I thought most spoke to me was what she wrote when she was my age, and I had a response to it all right. How she changed, and how she changed me. What it all meant. It would have made a great critical essay, in my mind.

But it’s The Dog of The Marriage that qualifies, and it is that which is pertinent to this essay, and now I realize, most pertinent to me. How to begin? With the depiction of rapes, the fear every day at being a woman, with the long shores of shuttered lake houses? With the seasons that followed, the dogs that arrived, with the husbands that left? There is endless departure, departures without permission, pervasive in her stories. Each loss flows lyrically into the next, as if each were a chapter in a well-crafted novel. A novel of loss—of love, life, youth, beauty, summer. There is sexual violence, both terrifying and thrilling. The narrator—whoever she is, Hempel, a collection of facets, her friends and my imagination—speaks the same language no matter where she arrives.

She is surrounded by people, by animals, by machines, and she is alone, with a trowel, in a man’s shirt. She is alone even in the arms of her lover as she invents a lifetime of sexual fantasies for a man who will not love in “Offertory.” She is alone as she watches the revolving door of suitors in her widowed father’s life, and when she and he argue, without words, on what time means in “The Afterlife.” She is alone as she dips the pregnancy wick into the crystal scotch glass as she recalls her favorite film and confuses who is the ghost in the movie and in her own life in “The Uninvited.” Sometimes she is irate when alone, as she is when penning the parking ticket rebuttal in “Reference #388475848-5.” Sometimes she is quiet when alone, when she remembers her mother’s death and looks upon her x-ray in the doctor’s office in “What Are The White Things?” She is on the wrong side of fifty at each moment alone. There are pets that nuzzle and boxed turtles that die on nets spread over strawberries, there are men who float in and those who she will not love. She is a competent driver, and she drives into and out of every situation, not a single one unfolds without her specific self-aware presence, and oftentimes, her actual car. She has the sensibility of a poet. There is a quiet suspension of disbelief here, those who are not the narrator speak in near-couplets (and she often turns a phrase on its head) and time is fluid—we never seem to start at the beginning. Often we’re at the end as in the title story, or in the middle in “Jesus is Waiting.” In “Memoir,” we begin nowhere, in void. And of course, that is precisely the point. Hempel may not have invented the mantra “every word counts,” but she is the gold standard in this collection. White space frightens some writers. Others must see the page the way a sculptor sees marble, and carve out from one block of it. If roughness, incompleteness remains, that is part of the whole. It’s tempting to point towards greater metaphor here, naturally, about life, but for respect for Hempel, and your time, I won’t try to make it. The Dog of The Marriage, however blunt, does not make me, the reader, scared of this inevitable time in a woman’s life. I sigh when reading it. Sometimes I want more than anything to be old and full of stories, which is a strange thing perhaps. Something that is rare, and that this work does.

As for how she does it, I understand that is the point of a proper critical essay. Also, not to use “I”. I was taught the critical essay should read, “The writer’s purpose is to do X through Y and accomplishes it using Z. Here are the number of ways in which it is done. Here is the symbolism. Here is God. Here is greed.” But, when speaking of Hempel, how can one do this in an ordinary way? In Rick Moody’s introduction he asserts, “Who gives a shit how long the book takes,” and now, here I am, cursing in my essay. It’s entirely wrong. But it is my response, my honest one. Hempel writes tightly—her characters are so compelling it’s as if the words aren’t even there, and yet, it’s all about the words, too. The sentences, as Moody says. She repeats, how she repeats so many things! And yet, it’s all over in a flash, a novel in stories, and it was short and it was all about longing. It was masterful, and it was heartbreaking. I had the idea that while writing this I’d somehow emulate her style. I’d write, critiquing Amy Hempel is like…and I would say something multi-layered and clever and just end there. Without the summation in words. But she does what I cannot. I don’t know how she does it. I realize that she does, and I see where and when. How to do it myself, I hope to learn in your program. So I’ll end my response with her words. The last in the collection, on the last page. “Unimprovable,” he says.

If only the same could be said for this essay.

Unspecial

Excerpt from my newest book...for kids (some adult themes are explored, btw)...

Today I turned ten and guess what I got? A cake full of mayonnaise, that’s what.

Mom’s gone on another site dig, so Dad had to make the cake and let me tell you, he’s basically the worst at cooking. Whoever said the greatest chefs were men never met my lunch. When Dad makes my sandwiches there’s never any mayonnaise, just the baloney and the bread. So what’s with the mayonnaise in the cake, I say when I blow out the candles. He says try it.

Henry makes a face and takes a pretend bite when Dad’s watching me cause when it’s your birthday everyone pays you too much attention and stares when you eat. Henry’s too old to warrant Dad making a sandwich. Henry gets money instead. He’s in seventh grade so he’s at middle school. He gets to have a really big locker that he’s always forgetting the combination to. I’d never do that.

“Mmmm,” I say and just lick the frosting. Trails of smoke from the candles are swimming all around Dad’s face. I must have blown them to the side.

“You didn’t try it,” Dad says, and sighs.

So I take a bite. It doesn’t taste like mayonnaise. It tastes like cake. Maybe a little burnt, but it’s chocolate so it’s hard to tell. “Where’d it go?”

Dad beams like he’s won the lottery and we can all go live in Hawaii. “We were out of eggs and then I thought, what’s mayonnaise except oil and eggs? Two ingredients on the back of the cake box are oil and eggs, and here I had both, already mixed!”

I want to interrupt that my birthday was no time to play around, this was the most important thing I’ll eat all day, but I don’t. Dad’s a biomedical engineer, which is just a fancy label for scientist, and he loves breaking down and building up things. He thinks didactically. I forget what it means, but I suppose it’s an answer to some question I never asked.

So here I am, eating the cake and still Henry won’t take a bite. He doesn’t like what he can’t see. Dad loves that about Henry, says it means he’s a verifiable brain-in-training. I said Henry’s an idiot, and my supporting evidence was people can’t see planets moving or see evolution. That’s just a leap of faith. Henry said I got it backwards, as usual, and waved a book in my face, The Beak of the Finch. He said Charles Darwin saw it because he was patient, unlike me. I go, I’d read that book myself just to shove it in Henry’s face if it weren’t so freakin’ boring.

Dad said don’t say freakin’, it’s unladylike. Another thing Henry gets to do that I don’t. I’m supposed to become a lady and he gets to be a man, which aside from not being able to cook seems a lot better because you don’t have to wear lipstick and no one judges you by how big your bra is. Dad says talking about a bra before I need one is also unladylike.

You’re exasperating, I said to Dad, because he always says it to me. He said don’t push it, so I didn’t because, you know, he was making that face. He was making that same face to Henry about the cake so Henry took a bite really fast.

“Hey this isn’t half bad,” he says, and with his mouth full too. And then he keeps eating, just wouldn’t stop eating it. His piece was gone in like, a millisecond, I swear. I count in my head. At that rate, the whole thing would be gone in one point two minutes.

“Don’t pig out! Leave some, I want to eat this all week!” I tell him.

I’m starting to regret that my birthday party isn’t until next Saturday. You can’t have a party on Sunday night, not with your friends cause no one will come, so we’re having our little party as a family. Plus the bowling alley would be more fun on the weekends. Rachel and Andrea and Sammy have never eaten a mayonnaise cake, to my recollection. They would have told me if they did.

“I can make more,” Dad says, probably as a cue for us to pipe down.

So we all keep eating it and I don’t say out loud how I wished Mom were here to try it. She’s missed my birthday before—she’s an archeologist and is basically always gone—but I guess I thought she’d be here for my graduation into double digits, since today I turned ten. That’s a big number, especially now that I’m in fifth grade, the last grade before middle school. It seems important to have your mom around for that kind of a thing. But then again, I wouldn’t have had a mayonnaise cake if she were here. So I didn’t say anything about Mom missing the cake out loud. If she were here, it couldn’t have been mayonnaise cake at all. That’s what Dad calls an impossibility.

Uh oh, I think I just grew up

I had one of those magically sad nights, Brooklyn and Broken Social Scene, the parking lot afterwards, the sounds haunting, billowing out of the spires of the Masonic Temple. It was cold, I was underdressed and shivering and we were sitting close, our knees were touching.

It was the most fun I had had with a singular person in some time, no distractions, no pretense, just us, our thoughts and our tenuous connection. One that we wanted to bridge maybe. Maybe in different ways. I can never tell what someone else is thinking, and rarely does it line up with my own.

Later in the night, after narrowly escaping the first chance to jump into something new, something old, it was that way again, familiar jokes and small noises, gentle hands and light possibilities. The moment when it could have been something beautiful and something horrible all at once. And the thoughts that would not stop.

What if all those things had never happened, what if they had but they had meant nothing instead of everything? What if I had never been so vulnerable and so blind? Could we care for each other like we once did? How about as friends? But friends don't think of each other as this, nervous to send emails, shaking when the phone rings. Friends don't kiss or try to. Friends don't pop in once in a while, between sadness, between elation, friends don't miss each other or what they once used to have.

And I floated above us, I saw us, two people who were torn apart and shouldn't have been, or were liberated and never should have been brought back together, though we keep perpetuating it for some reason I will never know. We were going through the motions as if history meant nothing, as if broken love was something that could simply vanish without its acknowledgment of casualties, of which there were many. Pride, dignity, dreams, these things were lost and they were hard fought before they fell broken into pieces, then pounded into dust.

It is hard to forget. It is harder to remember. It is easy to sigh into the arms of someone you miss, you loved, even though they said at one point they hated you, even if it wasn't true, they said it still.

You may have never loved like that before. You may never be able to get it back. That's the point. The point with no point.

And even for one night, it means nothing, because it is too loaded. It is too sad, it is too slow. We're older and we are running out of time. If one or the other cannot take the step to actually remedy, then there is no reason to revisit the past. It is the difference between what feels good in the short term and what will truly be good for you in the long term. You need a change. Not to be reminded of what was lost. You deserve more than that.

Sea change they call it. Realizing you deserve more than someone is willing to give. You thought it would be as sad as the rest. But really, it wasn't sad, not one little bit, at all.

For What It's Worth

I used to walk around with a little notebook in my bag, and jot down fleeting thoughts on subway cars. My fingertips, half stained with ink, were moving. I waged wars in my mind about self and sense of self, person and persona, light and dark and my own eternal question—was it more important to have talent or to want talent? The answer—or more importantly, my own classification in that thought, continues to elude me. I put it on here and offered it up. She commented and I had to take it down, because she called me by name. Back when I used to mean something. She thought what I said once was brilliant. She did not know I am not capable of brilliant. Only of pretending.

I will always have a racing mind, on a circular track. He joked it was a hamster wheel, I told him no, it wasn’t, it was a drinking bird, and the bird had drowned. A hard thought, we’d call that one a three-dip, the bird would throw back and forth at least twice, we laughed. What’s worse than ripples, tearing through the still? Having only just the still. Still.

Yet all those clichés come from something, don’t they? We nod. Burn brightly and leave in an engulfing flame, fade out and have those who know you now forget who you were then. Let’s all join in, this is high school and we’ve got some angst to sell.

Wait no, this.

Is after that.

Silly how we forgot. This is not that any more. We don’t hide on the mountain, sneaking cigarettes while the prep school police in the form of Mrs. P—old maid, adviser, science teacher, who makes the same lame joke about a flux capacitor every freaking year (it’s famous in its clunky delivery) when instructing a class on electricity—looks for a flame in the dark, to nail us to the headmaster’s wall. That was a detention offense, and that was a long, long time ago now.

Longer even than the pool of that house, the trading of magazines, the look in everyone's eyes when we talked about reading lists. Dogs and summer wine, lame jokes and Christmas. The walk around the lake. Trying to win her and him over. The last few emails that ever transpired. That was a long time ago, by now.

So long I can’t remember what I looked like, so long that I look at pictures from that time and can’t remember the last name of the person whose arm mine is slung around, I can't remember feeling so small, but I was, I had dreams and habits that made me who I was and I can't recall them. It was so long that I say to myself, I was a kid. And I knew nothing. Now I am not. And yet. Where am I? What have I done with this time? When we come together for the reunion, what will I say? Who will I have become?

No, this is not that time.

This is the marrying time, this is the making a family time, this is the passing it on to the next generation because we forgot to do something with our own time, we should have done it before we were in our twenties and now that we’ve crossed that threshold it’s less a matter of time than it is a matter of mind, until you find out what it all really means. Love is fickle and destructive before it’s everlasting, smalltalk is the only talk I know, and flowers are sent as contrition, memories are null and void.

The last few and many years were spent in a basement party, I have been tricked. It's not fair that I have been tricked, I hiss. What is this—Vegas? No clocks on the walls, no windows? I didn’t even see it pass. I know. I know. I could have stepped outside, I could have checked, but my eyes were fixed, flickering on the monitor, my fingertips couldn’t find a notebook, I was feeling sorry for myself because you were sorry, and I had nothing to make it go away.

This is not that time, we said. We’ll say it again. Years from now. When more of us are gone. But today, it’s just you. You are gone and we remember, the time we had and now, more than ever, the time we had not enough of. The faded paper on which you exist. How I folded it up and put it away, because I didn’t think this time would come. Not really. Because we never really do, even though we say we do. We are not prepared for death. We are not prepared for life.


Rest in peace, Alexis. I’m sorry today that I took your comment down. I am sorry today for many, many things.

Belle Laide

He showed up ostensibly to just say hi, in the middle of the evening, the lamp dim, the air full blast cold, our feet bare and barely clean.

He came to check in, up and down, and though I’ve been tired and on my own sort of weak-hearted bender, really I’d like to think it might have been to see if I still looked the same, had the same lilt, smelled like flowers, felt soft to the touch and still had a bony back, whatever it is that boys think of girls that they lose. And I had that new mix, all that old French rap, and clean sheets and he had cloudy sky slits for eyes and I missed him even as he was there, a whisper ghost with longish hair, longer than it should have been in a week’s time and the same familiar shirt, and I feel perennially as though I will wade through water instead of air forever if I have to, because I don’t know what I want but I do, I don’t know how to help those who also don’t know, and it struck me that there are so many people out there to love, so many people who are right in some ways and completely wrong in others and it never stops any of us from fusing with them anyway.

And it was one of those rushes that keeps pushing, to a thumping soundtrack and to a barely babbling conversation, brain and brook, we had these needs, and only if we had screwed up more, for real, could we be mad, could we take it all away. Tough enough as it is, and it’s all our own undoing. We knew it. We did it anyway. We anticipated the end as soon as we heard the starting shot and just leapt. Shit. It was stupid. It was ugly. As belle laide as Marc Jacobs aims.

Because you can’t start over when you never really began. You can’t heal when the wound was imparted by your own thoughtless hand. We wanted to conduct. We wanted to gesticulate and scream, talk nonsense, skip over cars, laugh too loud. We did that. We did it too much and to little end. Let’s play, we thought. But playing isn’t real. In context yes, but in the rest of this mess, play is escape, and there is no escape from New York.

Fickle

The funny thing about complications, emotions, ultimatums, the “never again” mantra is that all it takes is one morning when the air seeping in from your leaky window is just a little cold and you under the blanket are just a little hot, and your feet come out the edge for equilibrium, you see your alarm clock won’t buzz for another hour and everything seems different.

More than once the best laid plan is laid to rest. We want to think we’re in control of these sort of intangibles, or can at least recognize our lack thereof when we act out and are directed by them, but really, for me, I know that I am not. The manic moods of the unexpected call, the chance held out as soon as it’s not wanted, all of it, propels me forward in ways that I would never trade. Being alone and not lonely, being together and feeling so far apart, these are the things I can tell you about us. The greats, and they were greats, the best of them were so good that no other two people in the world experienced them quite like we did, no one knew as much, criticized so little, fell so hard and from such heights. We were the same, we knew that we were lucky only because something worth remembering is never permanent. It has no time at all, the metaphorical shelf-life of milk, if that. Just wistfully called upon in quiet moments. Like this. When I knew I was alive for a reason, and now, I can’t remember anything about it at all, just that it happened, it happened to us and to me, I can’t tell you why or how, but it did, I promise and one day I hope to tell someone, anyone, that I know how to do it again.

Self-Portrait

What was important never is when you’re standing in front of an ill-lit mirror, trying to get your nose just right using broken graphite, the first time in a long time you really looked at your nose at all, you think, and you have to draw it because your art teacher said we’re going into portraiture and you wished to draw someone else, clandestine, but you were scared to start, scared to not finish, if that someone else, whom you did not know, turned to you and then away from you.

There is a glance between two people who do not know each other, a moment of invasion and of topical knowing that is private, rare, by the rest of the world’s standards. Maybe in a supermarket, maybe briefly at a red light, maybe years and nothing like it at all. But here, it’s every day, multiple times, and here people do not even try to avert their eyes, they stare, you stare back, you both go on for subway stops, steps, eons like this, and you see everything and say nothing, even though you could have stepped forward and introduced yourself. Even though you could have approached them, like the new kid on the block forced to ring doorbells and ask if any kids reside inside, you could have done this, you could have made a connection and yet you did not. You will not. And they will not approach you in return.

What you do get though is that moment from your perspective, whatever it is worth, which is probably nothing, until you are standing in front of yourself, tearing up another page because it does not look like how you think you do and you see how you look to someone else, maybe everyone else and it amazes you how small you still are, and yet how much bigger you have yet to grow.

Less talking, more blogging

Blog,

Come here, baby. Sit down. Let me light this here scented candle and set a soft glow. Aw yeah, that’s nice. It’s pumpkin. You know, for the season. You know how I like to get all seasonal up in relation time. Mmmm. Hmmmm.

Girl, look at that. Your type is all backlit and stuff. Just like I like it. You look so pretty when your type is hit just right by the flickers. Prettier even than the day we met. For real. Come here. Don’t be bashful. Shhhh. Less you talking about your day; more sweet, sweet meta.

I hear talking. What did I just say?

Sorry, baby. You just make me crazy sometimes. Crazy with love.

Come on, let me rub your html. I know it’s tired. Tired of waiting on me. I know, shhhh, baby I know. You’ve been waiting on me a long time and I haven’t been there for you. No, no. No need to get all up into that discussion right now.

Now I know what you’re thinking. I haven’t been there for you lately. You know how I know what you’re thinking? You tell me. A lot.

What, it was a joke! No I enjoy how much you like to communicate. No really. Hey, hey, I was not using a tone just then. Well, I’m sorry if you heard one.

I said sorry! What do you mean that wasn’t a real apology just because I conditioned it on an “if”? Sounds like somebody’s really learning a lot at Wednesday’s bi-monthly Blog Liberation Group meeting. No, I was not just making fun of your interests. Yes, I know you’re important too. Yes, we’ve all heard that you don’t “need an author” to “support” you.

Yep. Yes. Yeah. Uh huh.

I am listening! You just said that I don’t…do what I should be. Is that the gist of it?

Come on, I do respect you!

Really? We’re here again? No, seriously. I’m really asking. Can you please just stop for a minute and let me what I came here to do?

Oh boy, here come the waterworks.

Okay, so I haven’t been around. I haven’t been treating you right. But baby, this is temporary. Temporary on the way to the top. And I’m out there, busting my hump, trying to make it happen for us. I’m looking for an opportunity. For me, yes. But for us.

So chillax on it. I’ll be back to you, sweet thang. Taking you out like I used to. Showing you off. Snuggling and laughing with you until the day breaks. Just wait til I get my money right.

Now blow that out until you’re in the mood to do what we came here to do. I’m not made of pumpkin candles, you know.

Crazy job news and so I’ve been away. I’ll be updating you with stories as soon as I can…

Where I don't belong...

There’s something about the smell of an art room that makes me wish I could fold myself into forever, where my hands are always ink-stained, where the ground is scarred by chairs dragged to the furthest wall to touch the imprint of someone else’s masterpiece.

Maybe because it feels ageless, timeless, as our best instructors have been dead long before we were born and wanted to feel clouds of sepia chalk in our nostrils. The quiet, the weird, they all have their places on the top here, their talent trumps their mastery of the language and we feel each other’s weight on the page. We make up what we can’t see until we can.

I have not completed any of my homework and I will be back in that room tonight, averting my eyes from someone’s bare body until I can see his shadows. I’m finding the exercise due incredibly daunting and so I’m looking into my keyboard, trying to pull out words from numbers, hoping to draw a blank in my mind and a little inspiration. In my office it does not smell like paper and pencils and acrylic, instead it smells of someone's re-heated Lean Cuisine which has carried down the hallway from the shared kitchen, and at this moment, I am very sorry for that.

Dear Donna Tartt

Dear Donna Tartt,

Fatal flaws certainly do exist outside of literature, though it’s widely known they remain far less romantic. I noticed this as summer ended, as I was glowering, dirty-haired. I was in the park, the sky a terrifying blue, the people picturesque, not differing in their sameness, their stained v-necks, cigarettes and dogs.

I had no plans to meet anyone, though I had long-since perfected the motions of seeming on this very point. I had a book with a ratty, esoteric cover and many hours which stretched in front of me. No one in days had known where I was and to my knowledge, no one had asked. Was it then that I realized suddenly, and moreover, with such sadness, that I would be reading a great deal this fall, and quite alone? Even familiarity of the idea offered no solace. The joy was gone the instant another indulgence became petrified and standard. It was expected and so it lost all reprieve.

My time in California, all orange groves and glittering pools in conversation, was not as lovely as then, in the park so many miles from anyone who had to love me. It was far removed from shag carpeting, the meanness of my father, our ugly lawn. I carried with me to the East Coast my petulance and nothing else. Children fell over their own feet. Birds flocked around bread. People kissed and meant it. The brochures had told me the truth.

I hadn’t heard from him in a month by that point, and even now I am a bit afraid to admit how much I missed him. Still it was not something I was yet used to. Throughout my childhood I was prone to melancholy because I thought it artistic while all the inclinations in the world did not make it so. I was merely small, in person and not. I will tell you now, it did not fit in with the beach slopes and taco stands. I did not fit in there at all.

The time I spent on a hard bench, avoiding those who tried to engage me, talk to me, rouse me out and throw a Frisbee, to marry myself to each passing day, brought me a mild comfort. I acquired a seventeen year old boy’s libido, lusting after almost anyone and anything. A glimpse of the most mundane could set me off; a slender foot, the veining of an arm, two walking together or one sitting alone. I found later that those around me had been just as wary and intrigued by me, ridiculous I know, as I was a bothersome man and my want for another’s life, no matter whose, permeated my every act.

I kept my front on this long after the benefit left, I was desperately trying to impress him with my brilliance, though I had none. Anything he could have said to me would have been fresh heartbreak, apparently he knew this too, and so he kept quiet and away and he must have been as glad as I was for that.

Did you understand this, the emptiness which flowed over us all or at least me in this time period? The formative years which kept me from connection, which remain beautiful only in memory because they can never exist again? I think that perhaps you did. It is your greatest life's work to have known this and further to have captured it. Our lives together, gin-drunk, lazing with our feet on the dinosaur egg rocks of the lake. My loss of memory. My aging and your agelessness. How another autumn can bring these feelings, stirred again like tea leaves, brought to the surface, and my need to push them down so I don't boil over and destroy us both.

My favorite book since I was thirteen was always thought of as sad, thrilling, adult-even, but could the prone-to-florid-when-imitated-musings become my style?

Past tense

I’ve spent my days hiding under a stolen bedspread and singing the wrong lyrics to Hot Chip. The nights have been different. We talked for a long time while I uploaded her music files.

Relationships, always the topic at hand. And the sound bytes were of a new quality. The coining of a new term; busboy (for the person who always takes away and never brings anything to the table). It was one of those endlessly important dialogues where you keep interrupting each other with mild epiphanies. Such as in a relationship when you begin to bargain with winning that mental tick mark against actually getting what you want; it’s time to tap out.

What I mean is the moment it’s me versus you and not “us”—and when it comes it is so surprising, so wrong, so not what could ever happen to you, you were picking names, imagining each other old and even stomaching, taking concessions for one another’s dreams, world, your tastes and faults and all that is special to just the two of you.

Not because people complete each other—they only compete against one another—but because it’s nice to wake up from a nap with your best friend right there. You get to have her whenever you want because she gets to have you in return, and sure it’s no longer rare, but it’s so meaningful to have one person who always, in theory, chooses you first. That always finds you adorable, brilliant, or just prefers you, every time, even if just slightly or begrudgingly, to anyone else.

And she says to me she’s glad, so glad we can think clearly now, but I know what it’s worth. Nothing at all. Because that didn’t stop that moment where we were talking about something…

Was that dinner on Tuesday or Wednesday—and I knew it was one and he knew it was the other and I knew if I pushed it, it would not be about that dinner, it would never be, it would be so much more than that, it would be justification, for later, with them for both of us, it would be all about that other person’s me me me, that salient harping point that they would not let go, though it meant nothing, nothing at all, to him or to me, it was everything to us later so we could hate each other in the moment and so we could tell them why.

And I looked at him and I nodded without saying that he was right, it was Wednesday, and still it did not help, it made things worse and I was surprised. I am still always so surprised that something precious to me will never be again and I said to myself—

Do I want to be right or do I want to get what I want, which is for us to be happy and complacent and it is no prize to be right, it’s all getting pissed off and poking each other in the ribs with “See? See?” when someone stops the fight for us, this unspoken boil between two people, how we fall away, how we don’t do what is kind because it’s only our boyfriend/girlfriend, no need to dress up, it’s just them, just that extension of myself which I need not tend to. We decided already it was meant to be and we did the work, we did the work already! We met each other, and that was all that we had to do, it’s all that you have to do when it’s meant to be, right?

And I told her, a different girl, because I am almost one year older, don’t you dare push, these are crucial times and while you are having your quarterlife crisis and he is having his and you keep pushing him to move it forward to feel like you have something, just one thing you can count on, you will blame him, he will blame you and you can’t ever go back.

You will want to and you can’t ever go back to when you jumped just to get a text from him, when you dreamt of his mouth, when you couldn’t fall asleep for the life of you, when you saw him up close and you were privy to the sight of his face sideways and you could not believe how lucky you were to see him this way, and how he looked so different than any other time, he looked so young and it amazed you. You can’t ever go back, you can trade it in for something else, a sparring partner, an extra ipod, someone to reminisce with, and maybe some other things, but you cannot go back, you can’t ever go back, so don’t you dare push it forward if you can help it, don’t do it.

I told her this, you know, and she couldn’t hear me and it made no difference even though I thought it would, even though I told myself it would.

Because I said to myself that I wished someone had said it to me—this is so sincere—how I wished someone had, but I knew as she looked at me scared and then unbelieving. I knew.

When it’s you and yours…

It doesn’t apply.

She told me that without saying a thing. That’s all well and good but you don’t know us.

We’re different.

We’re meant to be.

So we don’t have to try.

And then we were together all night and he never called her and she never called him and she went home alone and it didn’t matter. The warning, my eight more months of knowing, my year of bruises…because that’s the thing. You can’t ever go back once you cross that line. And you have to learn it all by yourself.

Dear Tom Wolfe,

Sure, we’ll admit if you ask us, we’ll always exist in the shadow of gothics. So what? Screw the book humpers who strive to snatch our throne, the galumping athletes who strive to snatch our snatch, sorositutes smoking Parlament slut butts and their wanna-be fluffer butterfaces, the ratchet of pencil necks craning, all that is ineffably described here, amid squirrely fraternizers chasing the golden riot manes of so many soccer girls.

Hallowed means nothing; this is hollowed, we are young and that is the most powerful currency the world contains.

Because we are the essence of alacritous cool, we are everything our weepy tolerant mothers told us through sculpted noses and plumped out trout pouts, we have Patois at our disposal and when the powers that be get all riled up, we lean across and over with a Whoa Whoa ease, Settle Down, Relax, We’re Just Talking Here calming as if to turn away all that we set before us just semesters ago.

Charlotte Simmons? That musty, upcreek cooze? Forget it. The once elegant walnut shelves of the library are warped with the rings of such passersby like that piece of--, their red plastic Beirut cups left to fester millimeters away from the leather-bound second edition imprint of Leaves of Grass.

It’s about us, not that. Look at us! Our teeth are even! And so white! Our hair is blonde at the ends without any bleaching and we resemble any star living or dead whose surname is Grant…and this moment before the mirror, our fifteen seconds, is not one which we will let slip away in our stupor…slip away in our stupor…slip away in our…

There’s no time for looking backwards at those who’ve already passed through these arches, there is only us and here. And it’s all rat tat tat, rut tut tut here. It’s all popsi-cull insouciance to us. Poor man’s Dr. Dre is Dr. Dis instead and we’ve got it all memorized and can recite it with ease. Inconsequential details you may get wrong, but the Patois, that shiz is dead-on. Dead on. Dead. On.

Speed up the milieu, it’s vanities in reverse they say, but we know. We know. People hate us or they love to hate us. We’re not sure which we enjoy more.

We are that bad. And so what? When you’re under twenty one, you’re nothing less than a god.

Vacation reading was I Am Charlotte Simmons. Is it possible to be exhilerated by and embarrassed by my upbringing as much as this? It's not all wrong and it's not all right.

The life of few and unproud is often delicious to read, but does it become my style?

Dear Jay McInerney,

No Bob Saget, I will not make out with you…

Oh, all right. Don’t make a scene!

So I’m at The Waverly Inn with a snifter of brandy, revising my latest literary work and I’m thinking to myself: Self—this is living, this is New York and this is what it’s like to be fabulous and wearing the right shoes and being vibrant and sceney and colorful and above average—wait, scratch that, Self—you better be kidding or else the next round will be a LAX stick across the shins…

So I’m at The Waverly Inn, gulping down my second glass of expensive Pinot because I’m meeting my writing teacher who is clearly way hipper than I am because this is her chosen venue and I’m trying to look like I belong when a socialite who I’m sure I’m supposed to know but I don’t because I can’t ever keep up with that stuff spills her Kettel One all over my knee (did you know they refuse to serve Grey Goose there? Yes, yes, they know who your father is and no, they still won’t serve it to you, you pompous jerk—the bartenders are really affable guys and one looks just like Bill Nighy in tight jeans and frankly, I kind of fell in love with them the moment they said they had one beer for sale and that was it). So here I go—hey, it’s okay, don’t worry about it, no it’s totally fine, and she looks concerned so I think maybe she’s going to pay for the cleaning bill or toss a diamond my way—helping the plebeians and all—but I doth protest too much or something so she pattered off in flats and I was back to my wine and no one to talk to. Dang.

Enter my teacher and then some married guy who insists on shots of Patrone at 7:30 PM.

Dude, come on. I mean, do you see where we are right now? Don’t be a fool! It’s Jager and Bud Lights or nothing. (Zing! I got a million of ‘em.)

So he’s married, but that doesn’t stop him from touching her thighs and my butt and we’re a tad uncomfortable because the guy is really nice (okay he was buying us drinks—zing! What did I tell you about having a million jokes?), but no, he actually is pretty nice, but he’s getting handsy and we need fries so we order them and we look around and who do we see but Mr. Bob Saget negotiating a table in the front?

So I go up to him and the host tells him that his table’s first and I kind of throw my elbow out and I go And my table is last! Hey-o! and Bob’s actually really nice and talks to me for a hot second before I run off so that I can end the story without ruining it.

Another guy next to us at the bar keeps offering us artichoke and chicken and it’s pretty fantastic (I know the place got a so-so review, and maybe it was the ambiance and all the pretty people and Patrone, but I really thought the food was good and the staff was extremely helpful and friendly and all in all I think the man's Midas touch brought a really great slice of old literary elite back in style and I’m thankful for it).

So I go to the bathroom and I’m digging the dancing zebra wallpaper and I wonder if I can bring back the phrase “digging” and I come out and Russell Simmons and I have a brief, but intense staring contest (he won) and I go back to my teacher and I go—holy crap, Russell Simmons is here! And she’s not impressed because she saw him last week, but the guy next to us wants to do more shots and we sort of look at each other, having talked about none of the things we said we were going to, namely cleaning up the first few chapters of my novel so that it can be sent out and someone might be fooled into thinking it's halfway decent, and we kind of have this unspoken thing like we can leave right now with the illusion of dignity or not, so we leave and we talk to some guys in a black Suburban staking out the place, presumably for Page Six, and I hand her what’s there of my novel and beg her to read it and I kind of hope out loud that she cuts me a break on her fees because even though the guy who started the soap opera Passions bought our last house and insisted that my dad install a dog elevator, we live in a much smaller house now, I mean it's not the 90s anymore is it, and I don't make much money and my parents don't hand out much either and I go home thinking, wow, I kind of got away with being there tonight, and almost fit in and it kind of felt pretty great…now if only I could learn to quit while I’m ahead…

An old exercise revisited...but does stream of city consciousness suit my style?

Dear Dave Eggers,

I read it once, but not like this, no not like this…so I was flipping through the pages and I kept seeing the words all jumbled together in this furious anger and it was cool, dude, it was just cool, imagine me saying that and having a clove in my fingers or something, and nodding all soft, maybe with my eyes closed cause I really understand, cause that's what people do when they really understand, like you got me there, you got us all, there it is, effin brilliant. I kept reading it and feeling it like I was sucking down espressos and popping pills or something, shaking my heartbeat off the metronome and stuff, but not shaking my legs—only insecure people shake their legs—and I felt it too, my fast, ugly youth, a disease spreading its branches, infecting everyone, oh it went out and out, man you should have seen it go. I too wanted to shout to adoring throngs, look at me, you just look at me, I exist, I’m amazing, I’m wonderful, I'll live forever if I want, I’m young and it’s terrible, just like you in 1993, but see that’s me right now, and because of the fact that I’m living now, right now, you’re right…

I don’t appreciate it, I didn’t appreciate 21 and I won’t appreciate 23, 25, 28 and isn’t that just the entire point? Me and you and everyone we know, our shitty apartments, our shitty lives, our rage and our pain, it’s all been done, so done before, I’m nearly gagging on the clichés over here, believe me, I’m not so self-absorbed that I don’t see the pure tedium of it all, come on, I see it. But I was talking about youth, and its profound unimportance, and everyone says it sucks getting old cause your body starts to go…forget it, I’ll move on, there’s nothing to add to that except twists of fashion, spinning this old record, your lattice metaphor, going bald, new Sprite commercials, whatever.

I’m just saying, I think I understand. And I'm behind the solution. Let’s bare our faux-souls on the net and get the adoration we need, that look at me, look at me, I’m here, I’m running and it’s amazing, this outside love, an undulating wave, multiple hands, I'll jump on it and be carried out to see, all of it, it’s good, it’s for us, it’s clear it will fix what’s wrong, cause we can’t for ourselves, we won’t cause we don’t have to, not when there’s insta-fame and insta-friends. Us on a blue-green wave, or driving fast through corn fields, that sonic boom, that wake we leave and everyone shaking their heads like what was that? Did you see that? This is us, man, and I’ll say man cause I can, I'm in my twenties, it's a law that I can say man or dude in front of everything half-important I glean, this journaling, this chronicling is not for naught. Oh no, not for naught, it’s here because we’re shells but we’re open shells, leaning, like reeds, bend at the middle, swaying to you, you can fix us, yes you can, if you just look, look, look at us, you’ll make us important, all our stupid crap, you’ll make it important if you just turn your head, over here, envy us, you’ll heal us with that one glace, I promise, and then you can stop, but just look once to take it all back, please, you can, you will, you will, yes you will...

An old exercise revisited...but does angst become my style?

Sampler

Days began to run into one another. Commute, work, commute. Sometimes there were ramen dinners in Queens at the one apartment she found she could afford. Sometimes there were lectures from parents. Sometimes there were leftover bagels in the conference room and Avalon would save her powdered soup in the lower left drawer for the following day. Sometimes she drank a contraband grape soda in the ladies’ room, crouched over the toilet, gulping as the bubbles burned her nose.

Most times it was thudding across gray carpeting, hunching over a warm keyboard, straining by the florescent overhead, half-smiling at people who did not smile, half or otherwise, back. Suddenly, it was mid-September and kids had been at school for nearly a month, and Avalon, for the first time, was not.

Stewart insisted she purchase that new drug dealer video game, the one mothers condemned on the news, for his nephew, though Avalon took too long for such requests. The death of summer in the city was not something she had experienced before, not really. Outside the air swirled clean and clear. Days were sadly sun-drenched, shadows dappled across brick facades, branches bowed under the weight of beautiful afternoons. Moments outside became precious, pristine as the city cooled. She floated ethereal to the subway with the purchase and fought the unending urge to sprint, her skirt billowing behind, hair to the wind, to finish the line somewhere else. She breathed too hard, too often, inhaling too much, a guppy flopping by an overturned fishbowl, greedily consuming her freedom. When she returned, she placed the game on his desk, her cheeks flush, and Stewart asked what the hell was wrong with her. Avalon did not respond; she was afraid of what she might say.

Don't Be Like That

Blog,

You’re right. I haven’t been there for you lately. Not like I should have been. No, no, you’re right, seriously, I’ve been too busy and I’m sorry. Come on baby, don’t be like that. I still love you. Give me some of that sweet, sweet html.

What’s with the cold shoulder?

Oh great. Here we go again. Now the guilt trip. No, no, I’m listening. Go ahead. No, I am not making a face at you! I’m just thinking.

Well, if you must know, I’ve got a lot going on, is all. I’ve got classes and practice tests and applications and work and going home for the family and all that un-fun stuff.

No, that’s not all I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing other things.

Like what? You know, just stuff.

I already told you, stuff.

You want to push me? Fine. Here’s the truth. Right now, someone else is more important than you. That’s right. My writing sample. There, I said it. Happy?

Oh boy. Here come the waterworks.

Look, it’s not that Writing Sample is more important than you, I misspoke. It’s just that it’s more timely than you. It’s just that I need to get it perfect right now. You know, for school. Cause when that’s all over, I’ll show you all the love and affection you need. Promise.

Seriously, it’s different this time.

No, I do not love Writing Sample more than you. How could you even think that?

And it’s not even like Writing Sample has taken up all my time. I promise.

What? You want an example?

I'm thinking, okay?

Well, okay, here's one. I should have been working on Writing Sample yesterday and spent two hours spearing scallops and sipping wine with a married man instead. So you see, I’m treating Writing Sample like crap too.

What do you mean that doesn’t make you feel better? It wasn't even dinner! I don't even have time for dinner.

Oh come on. We talked about you for part of it, it’s not like you were completely out of the picture. He likes you, too. Well, maybe he was just saying that since the way to a girl’s heart is through her blog.

Come on…that was a joke. Don’t you like jokes anymore?

Jeeez, you used to be so much more fun. Now it’s just nag, nag, nag.

Wait.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.

Aw come here you. Let me give you a hug. I’ll be treating you better soon. Promise…

As soon as the writing sample is good enough, I'm back to you, better than ever.

Training

I’m on a rickety train. It’s one of the older Metro North cars and it lurches, leaving my stomach behind, hurtling through stations and schedules.

I just came from home, and the remnants of a head cold (my parents joke that I must be allergic to them; every time I come home I start sniffling) and now I’m flying back to the big, bad city with all the obligations I’ve avoided successfully for days.

At home-home, though I sleep in a guest room long converted and very clear telling of my state of belonging at home (loud and clear, I’m to have moved on, apparently I needed a tangerine room to tell me this) I feel protected there still. Feelings at home negate responsibility, animals abound, everything in the town and every light in the house switches right at 8 PM, from bright to dim, and things are quiet without exception.

Home, and the years I spent under the tutelage of my parents, with their chores on the fridge, summer reading lists, far-too-strict (my friends agreed) rules on staying out later—all of that was to prepare me for something else. The truth of reality beyond our yellow painted door.

Jonathan Franzen told me, and told an auditorium, that fiction is a deliberate dream.

I filled in the completes as he said the phrases. Our truth lies in our family, and when you finally leave home your friends become your family.

Maybe your friends are more important, potent and meaningful. Because they are your chosen family.

This chosen family, and only this singularity, makes it bearable to be a human being. As everything else: spinning that deliberate dream, cutting teeth and cutting a paycheck, loving hard and wrong is all too much of what it means to be alive, and it’s that all too much which makes it so burdening.

I wonder if, instead, our chosen family should not be regarded and revered over our born family.

It’s my family at home, only, which knows we are bound together. It’s that family, alone, that will never stop trying. It’s that family who holds firm the unseen belief yet monstrous importance that we share the same blood strains and therefore must love each other, at all costs.

We together are indeed the only ones who try, every day, to make it work, even when it shouldn’t, because we are a unit. This is the family that cannot walk away from one another, because this family will not accept defeat.

This was my noble training for the real world.

Was it right? Maybe not.

In life we walk away instead of stand and face and fix at every turn.

We switch jobs, friends, roommates, fiancés, advisors and states as often as we change our clothing. Possibilities are infinite; families are not.

Today I wonder if this training belies what things should really mean for all of us. If the ability to flip outweighs the character to withstand change by staying strong at what has always been and always should be.

We have it all, because we hold nothing, own nothing. Without attachment, we have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain.

Our choice to commit to something makes it important, we think, since our own accord sought it out. Yet it also makes it transitory, because all of us can, and will, change our minds eventually.

Still, I would not trade my training for the world. It’s simply too bad it did not prepare me for such.

Tomorrow is operation number two, the defining one, and it will be that we will survive whatever the day and the knife will bring. This is only because I see. I finally see.

My born-in family has been my chosen family all along—a choice, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, that cannot be reversed. Dear Lord, I am married to these people forever.

Panic subsides, gratitude flows in, one more round of positive thinking and we could be done with this year, never to look back...