Unnumbered List Item: Losing Your Goodbyes, Kidnapping Hellos

My mom called to yell at me yesterday about the stagnation of this blog.

I told her I’d been in mourning and to cut me some eff-ing slack. She told me to grow up and cut the eff-ing crap. (God, what is she, my mother or something?)

I hemmed and hawed and said something about needing to create a mediabistro.com account to find work.

Then the mother-sucker punch: “Rosie would be pissed if she knew that you weren’t writing.”

A sigh from my end. She certainly got me there.

Two days before my grandmother’s stroke, which I wrote about here, I left my dream job. It was that gig that other people pray for, the one that validated everything I was trying to do in life when I signed the contract in 2008. I worked at it so hard it ate my life and I was happy to be consumed. I worked so hard the skills I learned permeated my own ligature, influencing tiny movements, changing the way I communicate with everyone from baristas to lovers.

And then, not too long ago, sometime back in June, I sat up in bed and saw I had been devoured. I spent weeks figuring out how to staunch the bleeding...and realized the only way to save the patient was pull the plug entirely. I talked to every mentor I have and each one in turn agreed: To stay was to have my bones licked clean, to become a middling skeleton resting in the same position at my desk, fragile knuckles curled over a mediocre portfolio. So I resigned. I logged two final weeks, packed up my things, cried in the handicap stall of the downstairs office bathroom, and then left, hoping enough freelance work would start flowing that I could stop regretting every step away. 

In the midst of many boxes and harried panic Rosie’s stroke came hard, followed soon thereafter by the phone call she had passed. I didn’t need the call. Rosie did come and see me, as I begged in that last blog post. She slipped into the middle of a dreamless sleep a friend couldn’t shake me out of. It started 10 minutes before her official time of death and ended 15 after the family was notified she died--we know because I missed exactly one 25-minute episode of the TV show we'd been watching. My friend said he’d never seen me sleep like that, sprawled out on the couch without a single nocturnal muscle twitch or puppyish attempt to cuddle. All I knew was blackness, warmth, and a feeling of being no where but being there with someone. No one said goodbye. I didn't see cerulean, which I always do in dreams. Just darkness and a presense. Then my friend’s hand on my arm sometime after 3:50am, his hands pulling me to my feet before placing me in bed. 


In three days I was on the train home for a funeral. 

In the reception line, people I haven’t seen in years kept telling me how beautiful I’ve become. Which still seems an odd thing to do--to offer validation that someone's pretty while their family matriarch is painted thick with make-up in a coffin by their side. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’d say in the same situation. 


I think we are forgetting how to be human around grief. 

The day after the funeral, I keyed into Rosie’s empty house and went into her bedroom, pulling open jewelry boxes and fingering her keepsakes, looking for  any cheap souvenir from grandma to keep on my person. I finally found an old costume jewelry pendent, black oval face laced with  filigree flowers and strung on a cheap gold chain. I put it in the back pocket of my favorite pair of jeans, the ones that get saggy at the knees and loose in the waist after you wear them a week straight, then sat down on her bed.

Death and loss are two of those things that I hate as devices. Everyone writes about them. We want you to feel our pain. We put voodoo pins in the hearts of readers and then string them to our prose, making sure every reader gets the heavy-handed point. PLEASE FEEL MY CATHARSIS OR I’LL STAB YOU WITH THIS METAPHOR.

But I’d never lost anyone, so it was easy to be judgmental. 





On her bed that day I tried to put pen to paper, and all that flowed out were the same cathartic cliches that have made me abandon authors in the past. Right there on my page: strings, cut and ready, voodoo pins already poked in place. I capped up my disgraced pen and solemnly retreated.

Now, like she (and Rosie) did when I was a kindergartner, my mother’s over my shoulder, making me do my homework, forcing me to write through all this so I can write again.  

I’m threading the cliche even as I prep this paragraph, but here we go regardless: I needed Rosie to die to put things in perspective. Her passing has been the unnumbered item on this Hitch List, a milestone on a life list, that important thing on the syllabus I must have missed when stumbling late to class. 

Loss, grief, missing someone, misplacing goodbyes--all reveal new angles in the hands of death. 


I'm talking about Natural Death, ordered and without tragedy, that inventible thing that comes and then detaches all its aches from your ego. The only heartache I have ever known is the kind that comes from break-ups, the selfish kind that paints people as victims, villains, martyrs. Those have messy scripts and even messier definitives: “You hurt me.” “I hurt you.” “You deserve to hurt.” “I’ve earned what this is.” Sometimes, "Hey, fuck you." All of it is me’s and him’s and she’s and they’s and you's and lots of ego. 

Natural Death, or loss, has transcended adolescent griefs. It's detached my child's ego and rebooted how to approach pain. Please: I am still a flawed, confused, maddening human being. I've not been enlightened. But I see things I did not now. And I cannot imagine being a true empathetic, forgiving partner to anyone without having met this new understanding of losing things through Rosie’s swift departure. It was one thing on a list I did not know that I should do.

But enough waxing poetic:

Having never been to the Sierra Nevada, shown a great desire to travel or demonstrated anything but a fanatic attachment to Catholic protocol, it came as some surprise that Rosie's last wish was to be cremeated, and to have my uncle spread her remains over the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. We were told about this shortly before the wake, momentarily kidnapping our grief and replacing it with a surprise new snapshot of a woman everyone claimed to know. I rolled the news around in my head as I sat on Rosie’s bed that afternoon, surrounded by all the trimmings of an utterly suburban and un-worldly life in one small New Jersey town. 


Upon the occasion of goodbyes, Rosie prepared for hellos.

One week later, no money in the bank and no paycheck on the horizon, I pulled Rosie’s chain down my neck and got on a plane to New Orleans, a city I’d never been to, a place I didn’t know, clutching the little black pendant and its tiny, tinny flowers in my right hand as we flew. 

Prayers During Purgatory

I prayed for the first time in months today. I pushed back hair and pressed my forehead to steepled fingers, stretching myself diagonally across the landscape of a bed, elbows out like wings. I prayed to my grandmother, whose stroke was no surprise, whose stroke separated everything we'll remember of her from a memorable frame. Her body is still here, someplace in New Jersey, sunk into starched hospital sheets and stiff pastel blankets, but Rosie herself is elsewhere. They use the word "unresponsive." There's minute peace in knowing it was coming.

The family's reports come in over cell speakers along with texts that state--assure?--I don't need to come home. I bounce between online train schedules and old Google maps of Monmouth County, the place where Rosie raised four generations of my family.   


They say she opened her eyes once but everything is glass; we look through, not into, her now. My aunt believes the liquid gaze means Rosie is still here, but my mother--the nurse, who works with death, whose life is acting both as its assistant and its adversary--has seen that look before, knows what it all means, understands how even heartbeats can be purgatory. She speaks the language of departing and is acting as our translator. The Rosetta Stone to Rose says that she is gone. 


If she had died I could pass a message up to God, ask the universe to tell her that I love her and regret not coming home more, make some unseen force sing my goodbyes like a telegraph, but her body is still breathing and I don't know where a mind goes so I pray to her directly, palming an invisible microphone, broadcasting to an audience of one.


Tonight's program skips the weather, throws out the traffic, leaves out time and temp, starts with affirmations and then rambles into "sorry," evolving into a monologue that pleads for her to hear me. Unrelated thoughts interrupt like static: "Grandma Rose it's me and I don't know if you hear me (**ksssshkthe iron: on or off?ksssshk**). I don't know where you are but I want you to come visit. I want to say goodbye even though I know we did, the day with the Earl Grey and the tin of shortbread cookies, the day you tried (**ksssshkhe should have texted backksssshk**) to give me more money for shoes before cutting out that article about Madonna's H&M (**ksssshkwhere's the dog?kssssshk**) discount fashion. I never pray anymore (**kssssshkwhat's this lump?kssssshk**) and know that you would hate that, but my faith's misplaced and we need to talk so Rosie please come find me." The reception on this station is some humming kind of mess.


I keep snapping rubber bands inside in selfish flagellation, as if punishment for not dialing more is something that's productive. I wrote to her last month, two letters in two weeks; it took so little effort there should have been two dozen. They say she read them out loud to everyone who visited, a little fact that pulls two strings into a knot, tying ego and shame into one dangling loose end.


In the last letter I told her she's the reason I'm a writer, joked about the money I'd have saved if I'd studied it in college, lamented how much better I'd be if I'd studied it at all...or just done things the way she told me I should over lunch when I was 12. They say she read that part specifically over and over: "The moral is, Rosie, you should listen to your grandma." 


I never wrote how my next big piece is in a New York weekly, one she could hold between her hands and tell friends to buy at newsstands. She never really understood the whole news on the Internet thing--she would have been so proud to see something in old school print.


I'm so tired this is blurry. The figures curl together. But tonight I do not sleep. I keep praying direct to Rosie, thinking she'll tune in for some part of my broadcast, check-one-twoing the mic with one hand while tracing maps of Monmouth County with the other.

#23: I Am Polly's Total Inability to Ride the Subway, or, How to Break a Drunk Man's Teeth

Since this blog's been brooding harder than a Belle and Sebastian fan held hostage at a Jonas Brothers concert without his cardigan sweater, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit. Specifically with drunken fisticuffs, lesbians and a new "Reasons my Father F-ing Rocks," in which Daddy Dearest coins the phrase "gorilla snatch" (hint: that's in reference to his arch nemesis' labia). So, the first in a series of non-brooding posts: That Time I Got in a Fist Fight With a Latino Man on the Subway. (My second failure at riding the subway like a normal human being.)

Now, anyone who knows me understands I'd rather be bound, gagged and forced to listen to a vegan propaganda opera scored by sitars than voluntarily quote Chuck Palahniuk.

That being said: "How much can you know about yourself [if] you've never been in a fight." - Fight Club

With that quote in mind "Get in a Fight" made the original Hitch List because, despite my desire to avoid the hipster bandwagon (mainly because I get carsick from riding all the way in the back), I fundamentally agree with Palahniuk's philosophy there. A good full contact fight can do more to unlock the primal core of a repressed suburbanite than all the ayuasca at Burning Man...and I'm mildly curious as to whether my core is made of hot, liquid badass or limp angel-hair pasta. 

ATTN. EDITORS: This press release embargoed until 2am or your 4th vodka/Redbull

While I have an advanced degree in shit-talking (from New Jersey U), I've never actually gotten in a physical fight, i.e. the kind where pieces of your body make contact with pieces of another person's body without the shared goal of orgasm. The closest I'd ever come before this post's incident was

A) The time some married drunk threatened to kick the ass of my boyfriend for cock-blocking his attempts to bed my best friend. I flew into an overprotective rage and threatened to "slit" his "fucking throat myself" while making belligerent hand gestures until wingman Ariel and two other friends pulled me off him. I have no idea why I said this, because I don't carry a knife appropriate for throat-slitting. 

B) The time 10-Year-Old Me slapped my 7-Year-Old Sister in the face over the last Fruit Roll-Up. (She started it.) NOTE: It was one of those awesome rainbow flavors and therefore worth fighting for.

Despite the deeply introspective nature of both events, I learned nothing about myself during those encounters, except that the darkest parts of me are willing to hit a blood relative in the face over a rainbow-colored corn syrup carpet rolled in plastic and marketed to children during Nickelodeon's Doug.

My fight cherry was recently popped when I stepped onto a rickety Brooklyn-bound subway train with intent to see some hipster band play a late-night set with a friend. With just two other passengers in the car--a middle-aged woman reading The Fountainhead and a nebbishy 30something guy in a skinny tie--I happily plopped myself down on one of those L-shaped tetris-piece seats near the door. There, I commenced standard "Please Don't Talk to Me" protocol: iPod in, journal open, eyes down. Also, knees shut. 

Two stops later the doors parted to reveal a bleary-eyed, balding, mustachioed Latino man (PS: This is not a Racist post. This isn't evan a Poor Little White Girl Victimized By A Demon Minority post. This is a Drunk Jaggoff Whose Race Is Relevant Because He Looked So Much Like An Oversized Cheech Marin It's Worth Mentioning post. Cool? Moving on.) reeking of tequila and swaying slightly on the platform. He waved a limp hand at some equally hammered pals, stepped into our car, examined the four dozen empty seats ready to cradle his drunk ass all the way to Brooklyn....then sat down right next to me.

Every woman knows what it's like to be leered at in a totally inappropriate way. It's a creeping, burning sensation that registers on some piece of skin facing the perpetrator, then slowly spreads across your consciousness like sexual harassment napalm. Doppel-Cheech Marin was an advanced leer-er...and his gaze was a tactical air strike on the right side of my body. 

But I can handle a leer. What I cannot handle is a lime and salt-scented hand reaching into my peripheral vision and toward my be-legginged knee. 
 

"Mami, tu estas bonita," he was slurring as the hand approached its target. I channeled Daniel-San and waxed-off the incoming set of digits, propelling them to one side with my forearm while vomiting expletives. Doppel-Cheech look perplexed.

"DON'T TOUCH ME, understand? No nos moleste? Leave me alone."

"Ehh....," Doppel-Cheech grunted, both hands up in surrender. I went back to the journal.

Just as I was getting my narrative back, a brown face and neck crept into sight from the right again, Cheech's nubby mushroom nose near-level with my eyes, hands creeping to my seat.

"I'M TELLING YOU TO LEAVE. ME. ALONE!" At this point, both of our fellow passengers were watching, but not saying a thing. 

Doppel-Cheech got angry. "Mami, whasss it is your problem, eh?" I noticed as I silently glared back at him that one eye was wandering off on its own like the fat kid with ADD on a museum trip, further evidence that I attract life's congenital mishaps even more reliably than reality TV shows.

I was determined to stand my ground, lest the dick see he was scaring the shit out of me and gain some sort of situational foothold. "You are the problem, now PLEASE back off."

He did. For about 1 minute. Then the shit hit the fan.

I felt one of the wandering hands reach behind me toward my shoulder, causing me to spring out of the seat so fast I almost stepped out of my own shoes and into the metal stripper pole strap-hangers cling to during urban commutes. I was a banshee at this point, brandishing my tiny index finger like a switch-blade and screaming at him to back the fuck off. We were hurling through the tube toward Brooklyn at top speed, the sound of squealing wheels only emphasizing that I was in essentially trapped in a tin can trying to fend off a tequila-fueled sex demon with no way out. 

Instead of backing off, Doppel-Cheech stood up, squared off and asked me why I was "such a fucking beetch."

NOW:

Thanks to years with Alex, a former all-state wrestler and devout MMA fan, I know how to successfully execute a d'arce choke, which looks like this:

Thanks to the immortal film Monster Squad, I also know how to do this:

And thanks to a year and a half living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I actually OWN one of these...and it was in my purse at the time:

 Yes, these are eye-gouging knives, made to look like kittens.

Did I utilize any of the above tools or techniques?

No. Of course not. Instead, I blacked out, probably squealed like a ferret dropped in a bathtub and remembered the one piece of advice Alex gave me when I announced I was moving to the big city alone: "Always surprise them with first blow and make sure it's devastating...you're small as fuck and that's your only hope unless you've got a gun." (Thanks, Alex.)
 

I remember the stubble on the underside of Doppel-Cheech's chin as he swaggered toward me. I remember cocking back my right wrist, fingers drawn in. And I remember stepping forward as fast as possible while driving the heel of my right palm up toward his chin as hard I possibly could. The impact of my hand clicked Cheech's jaw shut with a sound like ice being chewed, then snapped his head back until his eyes (at least the one not meandering off to Mordor or wherever the hell it was wandering) were at the ceiling. Cheech stumbled until the back of his knees hit the rim of his seat, the combination of now-halting train and terrified Irish girl sitting him down in the process. 

 

I've no photographic evidence of the encounter, but I hired an extremely reliable police artist to sketch a rendering of the event. It looked something like this:

As the train stopped I hurled myself toward the doors, screaming at Cheech--both of his hands at his mouth while he moaned--to stay where he was and not to follow me. The doors opened. I ran out, passing Nebbishy 30something Man, whose hadn't said or done a thing the entire ride. "And FUCK YOU TOO."

Cheech didn't follow. The doors shut behind me and I was alone on the platform save for a few late-night commuters straggling toward the exit. 

Having survived the whole shitshow, I did what any self-possessed woman with adrenaline coursing through her veins would: I burst into tears and called my mommy. Who didn't answer because she was watching American Fucking Idol.

It took me about 15 minutes to collect myself and figure out what to do next. I didn't know the subway car number, had no injuries, was unfamiliar with the section of Brooklyn I'd ejected myself at and generally wanted to pretend the entire thing never happened. So, instead of calling the cops, I headed back underground, got on a fresh train (after looking for a car with lots of people on it) and went and saw Beach House shoe-gaze their way indie-rock glory. My friend bought me a warm Blue Moon. I probably should have hit him in the face for that.

So. I don't know if the whole event technically counts as a fight. But it's as physical I've ever been while in a state of utter panic, so I'll count it. 

Here's what I learned, Tyler Durden:

1. I need to begin learning Brazilian ju-jitsu. Like, immediately. 

2. When finally faced with the opportunity to use it, I will forget about the MMA d'arce choke entirely.

3. Stubble leaves marks on the heel of your hand for 2-3 days.

4. Adrenaline makes me cry.

5. If you're nearly black-out drunk and all the odds are stacked against you, I just might be able to kick your ass.

She's BA-ACK: The Creature From the Hack Lagoon

Alright. So, I’m back. I know, I know, this changes everything--the BP(issed) Oil Spill, the spewing of ash from an unspellable volcano, that pathetically low number in your bank balance. After a two month hiatus, I’m finally back to set everything right.

But first I have to blog. The other stuff can wait. Right? 

I think we left off somewhere around here, with my hack-y, verbose recounting of a lost battle against public crying somewhere in the vicinity of Astor Place, served with vague allusions to bad decisions and garnished with epic writer’s block (imported from Italy right to your table). 


Dessert was two months of silence, a wordless emergency flare which signaled my descent into those dark, twisty pieces of transitional purgatory not easily expressed when you're being stripping naked and dumped out the side door of a metaphorical van by life. 


Now that the road rash has scabbed over, I’m feeling far more talkative.

Not that anyone will find it riveting, but a lot has gone down during the silent void that followed that mid-spring cryptic post, some of them happenings vital to know about for the context of future posts. So I’ll do a whirlwind inventory of events recently gone by, and if any lone, insomniac reader should find themselves curious as to any specific incident, I’ll be happy to elaborate. Otherwise, note them and file it away as my derailed train climbs back on its tracks and chugs onward to Blogtopia:

1. I jumped from mid to late 20s, landing officially at age 27.
2. I accidentally completed Hitch List item #21 via an unexpected 100% lesbian date, courtesy of the jalapeno tequila at Flatiron Lounge, three beer executives discovered somewhere in the Financial District, and an enigma of a human we shall heretofore call The Duchess. 
3. I got in a fist fight with a drunk Mexican on an ancient Brooklyn-bound R train, hereby completing List item #23.
4. I had a mini-nervous breakdown which made every good friend save a few want to gouge my eyes out with one of those fancy slotted sugar spoons normal people use to serve Absinthe. 
5. I rekindled an old romance with a former fling: brown liquor.
6. I failed to successfully complete Emotional Detox, and so, like Shifty from Celebrity Rehab, may need to readmit myself for a fresh round of treatment.

And. Um...

Fuck, I’m forgetting something important...why do the little details always seem to evade...?

...oooh, right. I moved out of Hoodwick Brooklyn and into a three bedroom on the Lower East Side with wingman Red and new roomie The Duchess who may or may not be my polyamorous ex-lover. We have a cat. 

Did I mention the apartment is six blocks from where Alex, as in this blog’s Alex, previously isolated in New Jersey, moved in after his own quarter-life crisis? With the beloved deaf pit bull we have joint custody over? And Philly BadMath (he's from Philly and sucks at math. we work really hard on these nicknames), one of my best male friends who I may or may not have once smashed out with once in college, which leads to no small number wildly inappropriate jokes at increasingly inappropriate moments in public places? 

I didn’t?  Okay...um, so that happened.

Point is, nothing much to see here folks. Just another Lower East Side Hot Mess with a blog, a bizarre list, a desire to write, and what looks to be a very average summer in front of her. 

Nice to see you all again.

Musing over Muses, or, Detox-Driven Girl-Blogger on Girl-Blogger Love

It's day eight in detox. And I think it's working. 


The first two days were predictably awful--me moping around in dumpy t-shirts with no make-up on through twitchy bouts of dopamine withdrawal, voluntarily isolated in an empty space that felt weirdly wired with a thousand eyes sardonically watching each pathetic example of my LAMENESS. It probably looked a bit like "check in" day on the shit show that is HBO's Celebrity Rehab, only no one confiscated the stash of klonopin I stuffed in a balloon and hid in my anal cavity and Dr. Drew was no where to be found, which is sad, because if he had been around I would have screwed that sexy, sensible, silver-haired poindexter until he took to his Twitter account and sent out a 140-character mayday for help.


Fortunately, around day four a few landmark things happened, one of those events being a relentless night of insomnia which would not be beaten into submission by anything, including two of the previously mentioned anally-stashed klonopin. So, like all sleep experts recommend, I stayed up until dawn going through the archives of my favorite bloggers.  


By sunrise I was delirious, overwhelmed with words and wit and bad puns and really fucking great bad puns and poetry that doesn't suck and pictures of assless leggings and months and months of the banal shit we occupy ourselves with on a daily basis that, in the hands of lesser personalities, would probably make me want to eat an entire balloon stuffed with butt-benzodiazapines...but doesn't, because when filtered through the prism of certain people it all becomes twisted, fascinating, relatable, and sometimes outright funny. And the best of it was written by women. 


Sleep-deprived and barely lucid, laying in someone's empty bed with dawn lapping at my face, my brain spun a wild, tongue-in-cheek Sapphic monologue, a talent-crush fantasy strewn with hyperlinks:


"I need an escape from my self-absorbed prison, where I let male guards piss in my cell and then ask why the floors are so sticky. 


Maybe I'll take off to Texas and have a torrid affair with the Hipstercrite, plying her with PBR until she blacks out and I can steal from her closet. But only after her cool Austin buds bail us out of jail, because if she (and this brain) and I meet and alcohol is involved we will inevitably get ourselves arrested...


...or maybe it's about staying local and fucking My Soul is a Butterfly's Hannah Miet like a palindrome, which is fine because she likes shit like that that. And when I'm through I'll loll naked and tangled in her sheets, praying she'll read a stanza of the poetry that flows through her as naturally as blood so I know what real poetry sounds like out loud... 


...I could marry The Sassy Curmudgeon, especially after this brilliant piece of insightful comedic foreplay, but someone beat me to it and she blogs about him frequently, and he really looks better with facial hair than I and I couldn't deal with the competition...


...I would fall for Ashley of lesbifriends, but it would never work out since her lesbian pals would find my bisexuality suspect and tear us apart like Tony and Maria (Toni and Maria?). So I'll just read posts like this on a fire escape "somewhere" (ha, get it? Oh man. Musical theater jokes. You hit the jackpot today guys...) and love her from afar...


...Meg of Blackberries to Apples is a good Southern girl who'd never tolerate my crass Northern bullshit, not even if I toned it down to write her name in the snow in romantic calligraphy like a proper suitor, but I can still watch her writing climb upwards like ivy and say that I knew her when she was a seedling...


...I've known Jenny of At a Loss for Words long enough to know she'd never biflingual, but I can certainly lay here and pray to see the world through her eyes someday, since I'd be beautiful enough to take pictures of (inside and out) if I could learn to quiet the sharpest words in my head... 


...and the first thing I'll do when I remember this ramble is thank the logical, unstoppable phenom that is Jessie at 20-Nothings, because she told me and taught me to write a blog, and opened a world beyond my old journal, and helped me find minds that make me feel crazy moments are okay, as long as you can make other people  laugh at them."


Then I finally fell asleep. I think.




So far the time in detox has done several things, some I don't totally understand. But I do understand it's made me want to spend more time in the company of minds like the ones listed above and fewer hours sequestered away obsessing like some far-off Rapunzel with an Aeon Flux bob and binoculars, as tends to happen when you get distracted by things without boobs. 

NUMBERLESS HITCH LIST ITEM: Emotional Detox, or, Semi-Illegally Squatting in an Ex's Apartment (with a non-stalker purpose)

I'm squatting in an ex-lover's apartment.


Okay, well, not entirely. According to the unquestionably reliable pillar of knowledge that is Wikipedia, "squatting" is classically defined as "occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use."


The whatever-he-was knows I have his keys, because he gave them to me. And, before our tenuous pseudo-romance pseudo-ended with all the flaccid fanfare of a cigarette sizzling out in a rain storm, he asked me if I'd mind picking up his mail while he was away on a trip I was not invited along on. (An exclusion that led to the conversation which finally revealed, to me at least, the Munchian portrait of how much he was "just not that into me." Hence the weird psuedo-ending.) So he knows I'm around his unoccupied residential space that I do not own, rent, but otherwise have semi-permission to use. 


What he does not know, entirely, is that I brought a suitcase, three different pairs of black suede boots of varying styles and heel size, a blow-dryer, a flat-iron and my laptop, and have set up for an all out affection-detox scheduled to last from this very moment until the day before he returns, whereupon I will slink back to Brooklyn with, ideally, some sort of immunity to him--a resistance to the pieces of him that have, somehow, taken root in the usually un-farmable topsoil that is my emotional commitment to anyone. I figure that if I cannot exorcise the demon of feelings after several days of living among the items of a life he has, almost expertly, built to exclude anyone like me, then the matter is out of my hands and I can go cry to old Joy Division albums without shame. 


I'm fully aware that this sounds insane.


Walk with me a moment, will you?


First, lets make this clear: this is not an obsessive camp-out. He is a good man, a post-Alex rebound I knew better than to catch feelings for. I was a rebound he had no intention of ever feeling anything for. And so I am not wandering his halls swathed in a burka constructed from used bed sheets while tearily keening to Vic Chesnutt records. I have no delusions that he will suddenly burst through the door, drop his suitcase on to the floor with a careless clatter and scoop my pixyish form into his arms, pressing my tiny head to his chest while confessing the time apart has made him realize all we could be. His journal, left in plain sight, remains and WILL remain untouched. I've even started to return things he's given me over the length of our purgatorial courtship--the skully I borrowed during an icy, mid-December meet-up; the vintage men's nightshirt he gave me because it made me feel like I was on Mad Men; the palm-sized copy of a book of microfiction passed along with a "you have to read this"--to their original homes. In his actual home. 


The thing is, when it comes to the end of affairs, I have chosen the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" method of healing hurt (with a little sprinting from my emotions tossed in for good measure) for about...oh, 26 years. OSOM is easy, familiar, methodic: box up all photos, ticket stubs, items left behind, gifts given, etc., and discard or hide them. Pull all bands/songs shared as a pair from the iTunes playlist. Carefully remove "we, he, us" and their formal name from the daily vocabulary. And then, as stoically as possible, move forward (punctuating the journey with occasional emotional meltdowns, complete with  Nancy Kerrigan-style wails of "WHYYY," that are usually triggered by the door closing on a now tomb-like bedroom). 


But this tactic obviously doesn't work for me. Seven years after the first major split of my life, I still can't listen past the first chord of Des'Ree's "Kissing You" without exploding into snot and tears like a cheap tissue. I obsess. I dissect. I blame myself for everything while running as far in the opposite direction of my own bloodstains as possible. And, once the over-analysis and self-flagellating passes, I find myself thinking about the death-blow and executioner constantly, like some ghost haunting her own tomb, seeing only the specter of the fantasy "us" and not the reality of the situation. Burying my head in the sand burns the imprint of loss inside my skull. 


So, a new tactic; an experiment of emotional kinetics. Staying still, rather than running. And attempting those fledging steps of detachment while surrounding myself with things I've become attached to.   


Toilet paper. Shampoo. His coffee. That couch. I'm injecting these little pieces of infection into my body purposely, until my emotional defenses are armed effectively enough to exorcise them. Call it practical applications of vaccination theology.


I cannot run from feelings anymore. So I'm just going to sit here with them until they run from him...until the fever breaks and I go numb.


Also, his place is 3 subway stops from my office, one block from Whole Foods, has heat and there's a motherfucking blizzard outside. If faced with the same option, I hope he'd make the same decision.


I am a mad, mad, mad, mad scientist. With keys.