emlocke

Category: It’s Called Friendship

  • Don’t Sink. Float.

    Once, I was in the throes of a panic attack induced by the crowds and the lines at an end-of-season sale at the Gap and a little too much caffiene and the frustrating fact that I’d spent the night in a huge hotel bed with three guys, none of whom had responded to my moves. As I retreated to the car with my two shopping companions, I tried to breathe evenly and wrangle my anxiety to a controllable level.

    “It’s just anxiety, it’s not going to kill you,” I told myself, hating the stupid set of self-help tapes in which my mother had invested more than that gem of a rehearsal phrase was worth, even as I dutifully repeated it in my head.

    “Okay, at least this can’t get any freaking worse,” was my next attempt to calm myself down. “Well,” I reasoned, silently, “it can’t get any freaking worse, unless some idiot dressed as a cartoon character tries to give me a balloon or something.”

    That put things into perspective. Composing myself for the last two blocks between me and the parking lot, I squared my shoulders and focused my gaze straight ahead.

    Straight ahead, where I saw an enormous foam Sponge Bob Squarepants standing on the corner with a handful of yellow balloons.

    Next thing you know, I’ve collapsed onto the far edge of a bench with my head between my knees. “Sponge Bob Squarepants,” I moaned once, pitifully, as if the porous, angular-pants-wearing personality had just wrung dirty dish water all over me.

    It’s in tragic and ridiculous moments like these, when you are reduced to a quivering heap of frantic, humiliated energy, when you discover the true devotion of your friends. Some of them will laugh at you, under the guise of laughing with you.

    Some of them will flirt their way out of the parking fee and use the last of the cash had between the lot of you to buy you an ice cream cone.

  • Lent

    Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 16:01:12 -0500
    From: Tessa
    To: Emily
    Cc: Eleanor Margaret
    Subject: yo

    hey ladies! emily i wanted to know how you were doing. how are you doing? i wanted to tell you both that i am (per usual) giving up something for lent. this year…

    chocolate chip cookies! a la eleanor. or as they say here [in Ecuador], ‘choco chip’

    im reserving the dark chocolate cookies that they have rarely as not part of lent.

    —
    Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 16:11:55 -0500
    From: Eleanor Margaret
    To: Tessa
    Cc: Emily
    Subject: Re: yo

    tessa, i am real impressed by your sacrifice for the lord. no potatoes this year, huh? i wasnt going to give up anything, then my friend luke said i had to so i gave up nutella. i never even had it till i came here, then i bought some, then i was a fatty. thus nutella is my lenten sacrifice.

    how are youuuu? did you get my email em? i loved your letter/artwork! i love and miss you both! im leaving for sicilyyyyyyy tomorrow. word.

    MUAH

    love els
    xoxo

    —
    Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 19:31:50 -0500
    From: Emily
    To: Eleanor Margaret
    Cc: Tessa
    Subject: Re: yo

    Wow, I can’t remember the last time I gave something up for Lent officially. I guess this year…I gave up Mount Holyoke! Hahahaha…okay, I’m sure one day I can look back on this and that line will be funny.

    I don’t even know what I could give up because right now nothing tastes good or sounds good or feels good, which is really discouraging and pretty sad. So I guess that’s how I’m doing, not so good, but I’m trying to at least keep a sense of humor about it, and getting e-mails from you guys helps so much, you have no idea!

    I think I will also give up los choco chips and nutella then, which is sort of cheating because I haven’t had a choco chip in a really long time anyway and I know there are none in the house, and there has NEVER been nutella in our house, so no big loss there. But The Lord will understand, right?

    Tessa, I hope that dark chocolate cookies are not so rare in your future so you can ejoy them more during Lent and Ellie, have a fabulous time in Sicily!

    Love you both a lot,
    XOXO
    Em

  • Un-Birthday

    An un-birthday is carefree the same way a half-birthday is decompressed of angst and pressure. And since I could pass any celebration off under the guise of Valentine’s Day silliness, I hosted an Un-Birthday party in my room yesterday afternoon. We had coffee and chocolate and decorated, and it was crowded in moments, but that’s all I wanted, all of my friends close together. Unbidden, most guests wore pink. I got a birthday crown.

    coffee

    I took this picture because the cleverly indubitable instructions on Dunkin’ Donuts Box o’ Joe, righty tighty, lefty loosey, cracked me up. Not all of my guests could follow these simple steps!

  • Friend-date

    “Perfect timing,” Lily said, as we clomped toward the bus stop in almost-matching rain boots, and it was. The bus schedule, which I had extricated from inside her tote bag in a marvelously choreographed move, since her arms were full of almost every pair of shoes that she owned, said that the next bus would stop at Smith in four minutes, and we’d get an express trip back to MHC.

    It really had been one of those days when everything just worked, clicked, fit together effortlessly. With my coffee just right, and my mascara clump-free, the gentle rain seemed to fall only to give me a good excuse to wear my rubber boots.

    It all started with one lucky coincidence: Lily left a bag of shoes in her parent’s car, and they happened to run into Melissa’s parents and passed the shoes off because they were on their way to visit her at Smith that day. Lily asked me to go over with her to pick them up because I knew where the apartment was, and because we hadn’t been to visit Mel since a rugby game early in the fall.

    I had been looking forward to spending the day in Northamptonwith Lily all week. Sometimes, as an appointment or event or date, even a friend-date, gets closer, I begin to feel a weight grind down on every part of me, from my shoulders to my eyelids. It’s an imaginary but oppressive pressure. My own uncertainty, my own hesitation, and my own hang-ups combine forces to stir up anxiety that leaves me feeling vulnerable, hopeless and fatigued. I don’t always want to go out there because I don’t want to hit that sudden moment when I urgently crave the security that only my bed can offer. I don’t want to come home second-guessing myself.

    Yesterday, something felt different. I stretched out my shoulders and neck and it took a moment to realize that the usual weight was missing. In spite of the weather, the day looked clear and I remembered what lighthearted anticipation felt like.

    The thing about Lily and Melissa is that, in one way or another, they have been tied into my life for a long time. Lily and I have only been friends since we’ve been at Mount Holyoke together but, from our first in-person conversation, I’ve felt like we come from the same place, in more ways than one. We’ve lived less than five minutes away from each other for years without ever really even noticing. But it still amazes me how quickly we caught on to each other, the way we get each other’s stories.

    Melissa and I, for all of our opposites, have connected since we sat beside each other for a month in the second grade –and then asked the teacher to separate us because, well, we made better friends than neighbors. She sent me a get well card from her cat and her dog when I had the chicken pox and we stuck together during the most critical social moments in middle school: between the bells in a hallway swarm of pre-adolescents. When we ended up at colleges less than thirty minutes away from each other, I couldn’t think of anyone better to have close by, and though we don’t see each other a lot, she has always been there, with an open invitation, an open door or an open bottle, at just the right moment. She can ask, “Em, are you going to be okay if we go to the sex shop?” and it doesn’t sound like an insult. I count on that. I’ve always counted on her.

    It was one of those days when everything came together, and when I got home, I craved my bed. But only because I’m a lazy college student and I’d been soothed into a beatifically content Friday afternoon nap.

  • People Watching

    On Anzac Day, I woke up in a wet sleeping bag in a wet tent, put on my wet hiking boots and hitched out of the local forest park and back into town to catch the train home to Wellington, where there would be just as much rain but far less mud.

    The train ran all day and I wanted to stretch my weekend out as long I could, so I spent most of the day meandering through Upper Hutt, a spot of concrete on the southern plain known for not being known for much of anything. For an hour or so, I sat in a cafe with chalkboards on every wall, The Best American Short Stories of 2005 open beside the mocha on my table, watching the Huttites dwell around me in their natural habitat.

    A man and a woman ordered dessert and each one was served a different kind of cake. The waitress departed their table and immediately the man sloppily scooped away the pointy end of his crumbling slice and scraped it on to his companion’s plate. She split her own piece in half the long way and held a dainty bite up to his lips. While he chewed, she neatly slid one half of her cake off of her plate and on to his. They exchanged flavors, one dark and smooth and one white and fluffy, without so much as a pause in their conversation about a movie or the weather or the holiday weekend or whatever (I’m not an eavesdropper, just a people watcher).

    Tonight, I am sitting in the Haymarket in Northampton. On my right, a man and woman sit with their knees interlocked, not in dining foreplay, but because their table is quite small. They lean into each other, laughing over the wrought-iron garden table, and underneath, they have the same napkin spread across their laps.

    Another pair of women just left the cafe, smiling down at me and wishing me good luck on my homework, which I’ve been half-heartedly glancing over while I surreptitiously observe the people around me, under the guise of the concentrating student. These fellow patrons were so friendly because about forty minutes ago, they laughed hysterically at Kara when she not-so-subtley stole a candle from another table for me to hold over my textbook and not go blind from reading in the dim, ambient light.

    They probably thought that they had observed a simple favor between students, but Kara stole that candle out of love. What would I do without her?  Maybe I’d get more homework done.

  • It’s Okay To Be From Fairfield County

    In the Spring, Bissell’s Pharmacy and Gail’s Stationhouse, two spotlights on Ridgefield’s quintessential Main Street, burned down in the middle of the night. I was in New Zealand, where I read the news in an e-mail, so I didn’t see the gaping hole in the small town facade until June. By that time, both businesses had decided not to rebuild and had hung ribbons and thank-you-signs on the chain link fence that went up around the charred foundations.

    Bissell’s was adorable, in it’s time, but it sort of smelled funny and was nowhere near as convenient as the massive CVS branch down the street. I wasn’t sad to see Gail’s go, since I became intimately familiar with what I found to be disgraceful business practices when I worked there for all of eight hours with no break and no tips and almost no paycheck at all last summer.

    Now, when I’m home, I drive by the gap in the row of Main Street shops (mostly antique stores and private realtors, with The Gap and a French cafe in the middle) and I don’t bat much of an eye.

    This morning, however, Lily made me really miss the idea of the small town pharmacy. I was helping her carry her stuff out to my car on our way back to school, and making the requisite purring noises over her Vera Bradley duffel bag. She said, “Yeah, that is, basically, the best,” even though she had apologized for her Fairfield County luggage when we drove home together for Thanksgiving last year, “it makes me so sad to think of all of them burning away when Bissell’s had that fire!”

    I stopped in my tracks on her front walk, the yellow quilted bag slung over my shoulder. Lily looked as though she might regress into a second mourning period.

    “And all that Burt’s Bees stuff, too.”

    When I admitted that I might have been tempted to dash through flames to preserve such amenities, she just nodded woefully.

  • Karma Chameleon: Water Daily

    Tessa says I’m collecting good karma to save for later in my life. Maybe so, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Maybe that’s the point. Bad days (and bad days all in a row) feel like the world’s reminder not to get my hopes up. Be satisfied with a good parking spot and move on. Okay, so I’m the only person I know who’s actually won a free liter of Coke under the bottle top. And I’ve won three. Lucky, right?

    Do you make your own luck? I just try to take care of myself, and between the gym and the banana fritters, I’m not doing so bad. If more karma is coming my way, good or bad, there probably isn’t much I can do to stop it.

  • Ellie and Tessa

    Telling a story on AIM:

    emons1010: me and tessa, jaws on the floor
    Em Locke 12: I love you guys, I want to come over and hug you right now because when you weren’t typing anything I KNEW it was because you were busy telling tessa.

  • In The Park

    Just this week I have had a picnic in the park and celebrated my half-birthday and won a word game via snail mail. Still time for summer whimsy.

  • I Brake For Animals

    Before my days as a licensed driver, there were those babysitting jobs where [usually] the dad would pick me up at a pre-designated time, scheduled to allow [usually] the mom a few extra minutes to beautify for the rare evening out. At the end of the night, I’d get back in the car and ride home to be deposited at my doorstep. Sometimes I wondered if it didn’t kill the mood of a busy parents’ once in a blue moon dating opportunity to have to drive the babysitter home after dinner or a movie.

    Once, I decided there might not be so much mood to kill between a certain couple.

    At the end of the evening, Mr. Dad pulled up fast on a pair of deer crossing the road on the way back to my house. He jerked to a halt and the deer leapt a stone wall into the woods, but as he eased back on to the gas and continued down the dark road he muttered, “Sometimes I just want to hit ’em,” which didn’t seem like the kind of thought that crosses one’s mind after a romantic evening.

    I had dinner at a jet-lagged Jess’ house tonight and Jon offered to let me follow him home, since I made two wrong turns just getting there and I didn’t want to overestimate my ability to find my way home (Ridgebury is a foreign ground to me even when I haven’t been out of the country for five months). I followed his tail lights, glad for the constant reminder about which lane we use in this country, and slowed down when I saw brake lights on his jeep. A deer was crossing 116 and he slowed down to let it pass. Nice to know there are some good guys on the road.

    Quote of the day: “She’s a cat of a creature, she don’t care, she’s velvety” – Frank Black and the Catholics