emlocke

Category: Thoughtful

  • First Urban Snow

    Just when the days start to feel longer, it sinks in that winter has come.  This is the part of the season that makes people complain and move to LA.  After the white and pink of new snow and cold cheeks and Valentine’s Day, there is nothing to do but endure the sullen and gray afternoons and wonder interminably if the sun has risen yet.

    I was waiting in a bubble of people for the light to change on the corner of 54th and 3rd when snowflakes started to come down.  I had never seen it snow in the city before.  That night, from my bed, I watched flakes falling through the streetlights’ yellowish cast and tried to figure out why I felt so unsettled, like I’d had too much coffee on an empty stomach.  Maybe because I’d never watched a snowfall like this from anywhere but my bed at home?  No, that’s not right; I probably saw more snow through the windows of my college dormrooms in Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York than I did in the four years that I lived officially in my family’s blue house on a hill in Southwestern Connecticut.

    I used to watch flakes blow sideways at the windows and feel like I was flying headfirst through space with tiny stars coming straight at me.  Warm and dry in the house, it seemed like the world had grown very still as it hunkered down to wait for the end of the storm.  We kept a ruler stood on end out on the deck to measure all that accumulated over night.  If it keeps falling through morning, it takes half a day for the family-owned plow trucks to roll out.  I always liked looking at my dad’s and my dog’s footprints in the snow.

    Snow in the city is nothing like that.  I couldn’t see flakes against the dark sky because the city sky is never dark.  When I looked at the rows of windows across the street, I more than half expected to see them filled with rosy faces watching, watching, watching, but everyone was asleep.  The sound of a city plow clanking against the curb startled me awake at 4AM.  Snow was still falling, but New Yorkers don’t believe in waiting it out.  No one pauses at the window and holds their breath.  By the time I walked down the street to catch the train to work, nothing but slush was melting in the gutters.

    Slush, I’m used to that.  The way tires churn it like a frothy cake batter.  The way it looks, at times, both solid and liquid, but is neither.  The way it splashes and immediately makes your cringe and think, ‘wet shoes…’  The way, after awhile, the plow shovels are just pushing it to one side of the gray street and back.

    The monotonous days of winter are upon us.  Nothing more to accumulate here.

  • My name is Eloise. I go to Pre-K at the Y.

    I thoroughly enjoyed today’s New York/Regional article about the fleet of luxury vehicles that idle outside the YMCA on 92nd street and Lexington, which I read bit by bit on the subway this morning by craning my neck while a man who actually subscribes to the New York Times read an article on the opposite page. It covers the notable increase of these vehicles outside the Y every morning as they drop passengers off on the red carpet that leads up to the pre-school.

    Yes. Pre-school. Not post-school. Not even school-school. Pre-schoolers are being dropped off for the day in hired cars that cost about as much as a year’s tuition will by the time they get to college.

    This article tickled me so much for several reasons. One, the photograph beside the headline is absolutely precious. A little girl wearing tiny brown sandals and a wide-eyed expression toddles forward, her arms posed as if she might be marching, from the open jaws of a Mercedes SUV. A round man in a very black suit and gleaming dress shoes holds out an umbrella large enough to swallow her whole.

    It is the very picture of a young child about to begin a day filled with chatter, play-dough and animal crackers while her parents are off somewhere else (note that this driver isn’t just waiting in the car, he is also am umbrella-wielding escort) engaging in hoity-toity babble, pushing around dollars and dough, and munching daintily on tea and crumpets. Do they know how adorable their little girl looks on her way to school? Only if they had time to read the Region section of today’s paper.

    I also love the fact that this article contains the phrase, “subsequent research,” indicating first that initial research took place, and second that it did not prove sufficient. And what did we glean from the subsequent research? 1) Most of the escorted children have fathers who work in “capital management.” 2) Most of their parents have been married for at least 10 years. 3) School officials have far too much time on their hands.

    I have to say that I found it quite interesting that all of this effort went in to running background checks on the students’ parents and no one bothered to investigate the drivers, the ones who are actually spending time in a moving vehicle with the kids.

    Finally, I am most fascinated by the letter sent home to parents by Nancy Schulman, director of the apparently famous nursery school at the 92nd street Y. As a former student, employee of my hometown public school system, and camp counselor, I have had the opportunity to skim my share of letters from school officials to parents. Most recently, I had the pleasure of reading lines transcribed from a letter to parents of Simsbury High School students, which included, “Please forgive us for going into detail here,” and went on to describe the “front-to-back dancing” that is now prohibited at school-sponsored social events. Like much of the mail that public school administrators send home to parents, it blamed students and society and encouraged parents to “have a conversation” which their society-ruined students.

    The best part about Ms. Schulman’s letter is what sets it apart from all the rest. According to the article, “The letter…reminded families that one assessment Ms. Schulman and her colleagues are asked to make by lower-school admissions officers is whether the applicant’s parents have been “cooperative” with the school’s requests.” She scolds the parents! You tell ’em, Nancy!

    This whole scenario reminds me fondly of Eloise, the rambunctious six-year-old who lives at the Plaza Hotel with her nanny, Nanny. Where are Mom and Dad? Absent, absent, absent. Meanwhile, their far-from-demure daughter runs helter-skelter about the hotel, generally wrecking havoc in every possible way.

    Now, I know it’s just a picture book and I know nobody wants to read about the Eloise who lives at the Ho-Jo’s over in Jersey City. The point is that, while it’s clear that Eloise loves living at the Plaza, she would be equally happy to wreck havoc on a less glamorous setting. Maybe more so. Little Eloise can’t tell the difference yet.

    I only wish there were a way to preserve the look in that little girl’s eyes as she is delivered into the world from the climate-controlled backseat of her Escalade or Beemer or whatever. I hope that she doesn’t forget that “paper cups are very good for talking to Mars,” as Eloise taught us, the very moment she enrolls at whichever private private private Kindergarten her parents have selected.

  • On My Best Behavioral Impulse

    The Uniball Vision Elite. That’s the name of my favorite pen. It comes in an array of colors, including jeweled hues of pink and purple. The cap makes a very satisfying sound when I click it on an off to pass the time during the weekly staff meeting. But most of all, it has a lovely…there should be a word for this…it has a lovely write to it. A smooth, crisp write.

    I’d say it’s been about ten years since I started having the impulse to color in my own lips with a pen like the Uniball Vision Elite. That’s a very indefinite estimate because I don’t remember the impulses themselves, or when or where they took place, as well as I remember actually having them. How badly I wanted to trace the rise and fall of the crest at the top of my top lip. How hard I had to resist the urge to fill in the curve at the bottom of my bottom lip.

    I confessed my desire to my mother once, half teasing when I asked her, “haven’t you ever wanted to?” She suggested I restrain myself. Then she suggested using a lip pencil to fill the void, but I didn’t bother. If I had been fighting the urge to rub a greasy, flaky crayon across my mouth, I probably would have just gone for it. Pen has a different texture. My bizarre urge is as much about tracing my lips with a pen as it is about feeling the ink run on my skin. And there is no practicing with ink.

    In the last decade, I’ve given this whole situation a lot of thought, and this is what I’ve come up with: There is absolutely no reasonable way to explain my own entirely abnormal thought process and I am certifiably insane and destined to spend the better half of my adult life bound up in a straight-jacket with very, very dark lips. Come on over and take me away. I’ll sign myself in, just give me the damn pen!

    Alternatively, there is the theory that the pen-to-lips impulse may have stemmed from one of two events. It might have started around the same time teen beauty magazines entered the scene and became a regular part of my reading material. Visually impressionable and faced with so many human lips, how could one not fixate on our mouths’ lovely lines? But I tried taking a pen to the glossy girls on the pages of Seventeen and YM, and I wasn’t satisfied.

    So there’s this other thing, and that’s the drawing and painting class I took at the private school in town for two weeks during the summer after sixth grade. I met a boy named Lawrence, who may or may not have been my first gay friend, and I painted two canvases. I still have both. One depicts a rock, a stone, and a pebble on the cross-bar of my borrowed easel. The other is a somewhat warped rendering of my right hand as if it were painting itself. My hand is wearing a different jelly bean nail polish color on each fingernail, just as I was, as every girl who read teen beauty magazines was, that summer after sixth grade.

    I wasn’t really a fan of the painting assignments. Let me rephrase that; I really wasn’t a fan of the painting assignments. First of all, both were pretty steeped in earth tones, so I had very little opportunity to use my favorite colors. Second of all, rocks? Please. Stop holding me back. The next Starry Night could be right beneath my surface and you’ve got me painting rocks. (I never was very good at the whole ‘taking lessons’ thing.) And I didn’t want to stare at my own pink hand for hours on end, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of transferring its likeness to the canvas (I just told you, I wasn’t very good at lessons!)

    My teacher, a man with tough, wrinkled skin and salt and pepper in his long ponytail and in his arm hair, sensed my displeasure. The unrelenting pout on my lips might have tipped him off. One afternoon, he pulled a metal stool alongside my easel in the cool corner of the art room. He watched me press the royal violet paint I’d blended for one of my novelty fingernails against the fibers of the canvas. I was awkward with the brush, unfamiliar with the nature of my media. I was also pretty grouchy.

    “Do you know why women paint their nails, their lips, their eyelids?” he asked me, brushing his fingertips over his own features majestically as he named them. I said nothing, just offered a petulant shake of my head in return for his efforts. “Because all of these things come from the inside. The nails grow from inside the fingertips,” he placed one hand over the other and spread his fingers out like roots sprouting from a seed. “The lips curve out from the mouth,” his fingertips bloomed from where he held them close to his face. “The eyes open up from inside,” he held his hands up, palms out, as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Don’t you think?”

    “I’d never thought of it like that, but yeah.” I could not hide my awe behind my pre-teen sullenness.

    “Oh, don’t listen to me,” he said, swinging one leg over the seat of the stool and pushing it out from under him with the ball of his foot. The metal scraped against the cement floor. “I just made all that up.”

    I was mad at him for tricking me and I wanted to grab him by the elbow and tell him that he was wise and right, right enough to send his ideas in to some magazine so everyone could read them. And now I’m twenty-two and I don’t really read those magazines anymore, but I still think about what comes from the inside every now and then, when I’m looking in the mirror. And when I jot a note or write a draft or sign my name with Uniball Elite Vision, or a pen with an equally great write, I imagine pressing the fine tip to the pout of my lips. Maybe I’ll go through with it one day, just to see what it would feel like.

  • On My Way Out of It, Thoughts On New York

    Before I moved to New York, I felt small. Not in a bad way, just in a one person surrounded by the whole entire world kind of way. Just one girl, a pinprick of a being on the planet, an all-encompassing globe of a place. And the world is a big place. Overwhelmingly large, in fact, but full of potential. So big that it seems as though it could be boundless.

    I’m a New Yorker now. Sounds great, right? Um, of course it is. But when I moved to New York, I think my world got smaller. This city is so big that it became my world all by itself.

    Maybe for some, New York is a world enough. It is amazing that so much exists within the city limits. But to work, shop, eat, dance, sleep – to live within those city limits also means existing within boundaries, and I’m just not used to thinking about a world with boundaries. So sometimes I feel like, when my world got smaller, so did I.

    It’s like this: Is it possible that somewhere out there in the world, another person is listening to “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Sure. Is it playing somewhere else in New York? Maybe, I guess. What about here, on this Manhattan bound F-train, in the ear buds of another passenger? Nearly impossible.

    It’s ironic that a place renowned for being larger than life can reduce one of its inhabitants to such isolation. Maybe that’s the true significance behind the great irony of NYC: so much squeezed into a space that is, geographically speaking, quite small. I might be the only person in my zip code who’s still listening to BTO, but I can’t be the only one who is feeling a little squeezed.

    That’s a comfort, I think, as I wait for the uptown 6. I’m watching and listening to the other subway passengers, a humming swarm all migrating north or south, all on their way to somewhere. I hear snatches of chatter, but it’s not eavesdropping because this is New York, and this is a subway platform, and this is how we communicate.

    There is a girl to my right telling her friend how much she likes snow. Over the Guster that’s now playing on my iPod, I hear the friend say that her super was adorably overzealous about the first snowfall of the season, about half an inch this morning. I picture a balding man in a thick sweater vest, scraping merrily at the dusting of flakes on a stoop.

    I’m not part of their conversation, and at the same time, I am. I try to remember the last conversation I had with one of my friends in the middle of a crowded subway station. It wasn’t unlike this one.

    Because talking is what we all do. We talk about people. Family, friends, enemies. People we don’t know. People we like. People we want to be like. Even when we’re talking about things we read or heard or saw or tasted, whoever wrote or yelled or asked or sang or did or baked is part of the conversation.

    New Yorkers. There are eight million of us, and we’re all talking about each other. That’s something we all share. We’re all participants in an ongoing conversation about all that’s seen or heard, changing or happening in this city.

    There are always going to be those times when I crave camaraderie, and I continue to be surprised by how hard it is to find in New York. A few weeks ago, an unpleasant odor had southern Manhattan all a buzz, and I thought, “This is it? The smell of natural gas is going to bring us all together?” But the air cleared, we stopped making wrinkly-nosed faces at one another and asking in spontaneous unison, “do you smell that?” and we were all sort of on our own again.

    At times like those, the only thing to do is affirm your own presence. No promises that someone else will do it for you. So here I am, on a waiting train in Grand Central now. I have my feet up on the seat across from me. I’m wearing my mom’s pearls. My sweater has a hole in the armpit. My iPod has shuffled to Toad and the Wet Sprocket’s “Good Intentions.” I’m using a black pen to write all of this down in a tiny blue notebook, using my immoderately large bag as a lap desk. I’m on my way out of town for the weekend, but I’ll be back in New York by Sunday.

  • Ready or Not, I’m All Wound Up

    He is winding the watch of his wit;
    by and by it will strike.

    – William Shakespeare

    In 2004, I resolved to leave shorter messages in the voice mail boxes of my loved ones. What was meant to be a benevolent effort to stop wasting others’ cell phone minutes backfired before the ball dropped. For the next twelve months, my recordings rambled on, unchanged in length or senselessness, only augmented by this hurried salutation:

    “This message is really long, and you know, I resolved to leave shorter messages this year, so I’m going to hang up now, really, I’m hanging up, really…okay, bye!”

    In 2006, I resolved to listen to the stereo in my car at a lower volume. With the windows closed, I kept the dial at 22 or below. With the windows open, I could pump it up to 26. My success with this resolution depended on the digital volume meter holding me accountable to the neon blue numbers on the display. Maybe if I had someone to hold up a stop-watch every time I left a message on the phone, I would have had a fighting chance with my failed resolution of 2004.

    Maybe it was just silly to resolve to squelch one of my most primal urges. How can I fight the need to ramble?

    Which brings me, through the essential blogging device fondly known as the segue, to my 2007 resolution. How can I fight my primal need to write? I’ve been waiting too long for wit to strike.

    A few months ago, someone told me, “I don’t think I’ll ever be happy unless I’m writing.” It made such certain sense to my head that he could have been reading my mind, but my heart felt pierced, as if it were suffering a slow, persistent loss. I should have started writing something at that precise moment. Instead, I started thinking about writing – the act, the product – and happiness – the state of being, the noun. It complicated what should have been effortless. Writing is a primal aspect of who I am. How can I fight it?

    My New Year’s Resolution for the rapidly approaching 2007 is to start blogging again, and to start writing again. But not right this moment. I have a party to attend. So I’m going to go now, really, I’m going, really…okay, okay, goodbye.

  • What We Walk With

    I caught myself saying something this weekend that I didn’t really mean. I said that, if I could, I would forget everything about New Zealand except for this moment. As if I could wish it all away, which I can’t.  As if I wish I could wish it all away, which I don’t.

    I would not forget the Indian man who owned the one candy shop in Wellington with occasional stocks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He had the posture of a polite bobble-head doll and he came around to lean against his candy counter every time he saw me come down the front aisle to see if the precious stock had been delivered. I would not forget the way he shrugged his shoulders without taking his hands out of his pockets, or Post-It note that he stuck to the side of his cash register with my name written on it. “Emily W.” he scribbled with a penmanship that made my name look like it might be a Bengali word, right above “peanut butter cups,” which might be the most American phrase ever.

    I would not forget adorable, goofy, gorgeous Andred asking incessantly, “Are you happy?” in his gleeful Kiwi intonation, and I will always remember being so charmed that I could only insist, “Yes!” even if it was a lie and even though there were so many other things I would have rather told him.

    I would not forget filling empty apple juice quarts with tap beer at Pak ‘N’ Save for NZ$3, even though I always ended up at StarMart the next morning to buy a new quart of apple juice to nurse my hangover.

    I would not forget possum flu, because as painful and frightening and revolting as it was, it makes a damn good story.

    I would not forget that Bon Jovi came on the fussy NZ radio just as I took the wheel on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road for the first time.

    I would not forget sitting up in the night to feel the world trembling all around me during my first, and not my last earthquake.

    I probably would forget the torment of the daily walk up to a campus in the world’s most hilly city in a body that was not my own, a body weighed down by a world-class binge of emotional eating, a body that I wanted to crawl out of as I practically crawled up the hill to class in Kelburn.

    But I would not forget the day I dragged that unfamiliar body through sleet and alpine winds, over crags and pinnacles and across eroded plains covered only in clumps of razor-sharp grass. I would not forget crouching in the pitch black bush after thirteen hours on foot, waiting for my own tears to fall, only to have the legs that I couldn’t bear to look down at pick me up and carry me forward, leaving the priss who has been ridiculed and who has ridiculed me on her knees on the side of a mountain in the Tararua Range.

    I would not forget the ill-fated experiment of a chocolate bar filled with kiwifruit-flavored jelly, though I would never bring myself to taste it again.

    I would not forget getting to know my dad in the sounds of a mix CD that he had made for me, but to which I had never bothered to listen. When they play one of those songs at my wedding, I will not remember listening to it as I walked alone along the harbor. I will remember that I could hear my father telling me to be brave, to stick it out, that he believed in me.

    I would not forget planting trees on Mana Island. I will think of them often; I hope that they are growing.

    The truth is, as well all know, as Jim Carey and Kate Winslet showed us on a cold beach in Montauk, memory counts for something. It’s supposed to stick and we’re stuck with it. Like a melted peanut butter cup. Like kiwifruit jelly in your teeth. Like a possum in a water tank. Like your dad’s wise words in your ear. I remember feeling stuck in New Zealand. I also remember what it felt like to escape. I walked away, a little weaker and maybe a little tougher, all for the memories that stuck with me. If only I’d stuck a little closer to Andred.

  • Wine and Manifesto

    On Friday, I decided that I wouldn’t consider myself officially unemployed until Monday.  Practically everyone is unemployed over the weekend.  That was my reasoning.  That’s how I found myself eating dry ramen on the couch at 12:34 on Monday morning while I stare at the cover letters and thank you notes that I started to compose last week.

    But I think I produced my best work during the Summer Publishing Institute’s closing luncheon on Friday.  After three glasses of Chilean chardonnay, I started pulling old receipts out of my wallet and scribbling thoughts down on the back.  When I woke up from my wine-induced nap hours later, I pulled them out of my bag and read my personal manifesto, loosely based on whatever inspiring words our program director was rambling off at the time, for what might as well have been the first time.  It’s pretty moving, or at least, the room seemed to be while I was writing.

    I seem to appreciate myself quite a bit after a little wine.  I must have used the word ‘brave’ at least five times.  I may tend to repeat myself, but my punctuation is on point.  At times, the following is pretty sassy.  On the other hand, it’s certainly not untrue.

    Emily,

    You have made passages that you have chosen on your own.  You have made your own brave choices.  You have made your own brave leaps and you are courageous enough to make more.

    Love, Emily

    1. Transition: you are in a transition during which you will learn, and decide and change.  You are transitioning, but you will always be you.

    2. Change:  You have made changes.  You have made changes that no one else has understood or believed in and you made them anyway because you decided – you chose – what was best for you and you went after it, caught it, and it was brave.  You could have stayed put, but you took action.  You learned to stop settling and start reaching, start demanding, start insisting that you knew – and you do know – what is right for you.  You are a strong, creative and capable woman and you can achieve whatever you choose to chase.

    Look at yourself.  The people you allow to see you love, trust and admire what they see.  It is normal to doubt yourself.  It is healthy to temper that doubt with faith and confidence, because that is what people will see in you – yes, you – when you enter a room, complete a project, or walk out with everyone checking out your adorable ass.

    Why don’t you believe in your own staggering presence…well, I guess I can’t say that I don’t understand that because I am you; I have lived through everything with you that has left you that way.  I hope that now, you – and I – will be able to look at the future and what we mean in the world ahead of us.  We are capable, beautiful, smart, and brave.

    Some years ago, you worked at a dance store where you got the job because your Girl Scout leader owned the place.  But one evening, your mom came to pick you up and while you clocked out, she told the manager who she was and the manager said, “Oh, Emily, of course!  She’s going to take on the world.”  Dance accessories, Emily, you could change the world with dance accessories.

    You can change the world with words or passion or hard work, or with love.  You love hard.

    I’m trying to choose a favorite part.  It’s either the line about my adorable ass or the part where I realize that I’m writing to myself and using first-person plural pronouns.

  • Been on Hiatus

    Hiatus: noun. a pause or gap in series, sequence, or process

    A break can last fifteen minutes, four days or two weeks. It can be a change in the weather or the jump to a new page. It could be an escape or a fortuitous opportunity. Breaks are required by law, taken by choice, made by accident, or stumbled upon.

    There have been a variety of breaks in the last six months of my life. I spent my winter break right back at school as a literary agent intern where I got my “big” break into the publishing industry. My brother and I broke our dad’s Donald Duck mug, and even though he almost never uses it, we hunted down a new one on eBay because it broke our sentimental hearts. I took an unanticipated break from school and spent the whole time wearing broken-in sweats and feeling like I was breaking all the rules. My broken computer hobbled along to the end of the semester, holding out just long enough for Apple to break out the Macbook, on which I am writing today.

    I took a break from blogging. I missed it. I missed the words and the thesaurus and the neat lines of text and two-pixel borders around images. I missed counting up hits and rolling my eyes at the most peculiar referrals.

    It was more of a pause, I’d say, in my capacity to write in any way that could satisfy my standards. I’ve had writer’s block that was less of a boulder or a wall and more of a yawning gap in the road, which could not be crossed for lack of poetic words or thoughts that followed uninterrupted paths of logic. I’d compose one sentence, but before I could finish the second, I’d be dwelling on the first again, tweaking and editing the bliss out of language by sterilizing the process. I felt detached from everything I wrote and that was the most lost that I’ve ever felt. My own thoughts blared inside my head with an indecipherable cacophony, creating a resonating throb, but no poetry or prose.

    At New Year’s, in the fourth grade, I bought a composition notebook and resolved to start a journal in which I wrote down one positive thing about every day. I lasted about six weeks, a stretch either much longer or much shorter than any of my other New Year’s Resolutions have lasted in the years since. A few times, I missed a day and made it back to the notebook, but once a week had passed, it seemed too late, past the point.

    I’m not going to let there be a point beyond which it is too late to return to the blog. I’ll give myself a break, a hiatus here and there, but it’s worth coming back and clicking Compose New Entry when inspiration strikes.

  • On Being a Cowgirl

    There was a time, more than a year ago, when I was living in New Zealand and spending long, lonely afternoons walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington with one iPod earbud plugged into one ear, doggedly teaching myself two new lessons about who I was in the world. To protect myself from the silence of a day when I spoke to not one other person, in defense against the 18-hour gap in time between my brother and my parents and my dog, as armor against the humorless absurdity of 4-degree nights in my bedroom, I convinced myself, I subconsciously trained my head and my heart to believe two decisive truths:

    1. I would never fall in love.
    2. I would never make another friend.

    I couldn’t imagine either ever happening again with any marked success and I couldn’t imagine surviving another failed attempt.

    In a strange, backward way of the human subconscious, these dismal beliefs eased my loneliness and heartache. I came to know these things so deeply that I was hardly aware of them, but it was a comfort that, when I felt unloved or unwanted or rejected or abandoned, I didn’t have to feel lost. It was just meant to be that way.

    As the invulnerable cowgirl, loneliness became independence. Longing became indifference. The absence of another made way for a sharper presence of self. I became a girl who chewed on her lower lip not to stave off tears, but to present a fierce autonomy that was both seductive and unattainable. No one could touch me.

    In the months after I returned home and then started my last year at school, I slowly unlearned my defense mechanisms, but I have not forgotten them, my once indelible truths. I double-check my choices against them sometimes. I’m sad that what remains are not the beautiful, sparkling daggers of defiant independence, but a silhouette of the brave cowgirl I once was.

    It seemed that once I was finally aware of the defenses I had built like a turret around myself, the most potent strength that I held up there in a hundred-foot tower drained away and left me only with the bittersweet memory of what it felt like it need no one, to trust no one, to take a dark kind of pleasure in long afternoons spent walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington, New Zealand all alone.

    Now, when I need that pleasure, I only have the idea of what it felt like to love only myself and to be loved by only myself. When I reach out to feel for the turrets, my hand passes through the vulnerability of a wall that no longer exists. I walk on vulnerable like it’s a fine line between potential and pain, and I think about the ups and the downs of every hill on every street in Wellington. I’ve unlearned my ‘never’ rules. Now I’m learning again to take the ups with the downs, or the downs with the ups. I’m learning to remember the strength of the dark cowgirl and pair her with someone who became a stranger to me for awhile, who I buried in anger and fear. I am still the open, laughing friend. I am still the candid, innocent girl. The severity of her counterpart has ebbed with time, but she won’t ever vanish for good. I have found them both. They are both parts of this whole.

  • Lazy

    We are all imperfect. There are people in our lives who we hope we can count on to be forgiving, accepting, even endeared by our flaws. Sometimes they are the people who want most to believe that we have none, and they are the ones who are caught off guard when we falter.

    And then there are those who want nothing more than to flop over and lie nose to nose with you and say, without words, “No matter what, you’re okay with me.”