Eldridge Street, New York City

Have I come to the moment where I can retire this diary? It seems that way sometimes. It's not that I've been so busy.  In fact, I spend quite a bit of my time alone these days. Long stretches of no one.  Sometimes it is so maddening that I am tempted to hurl one of my books against the wall, just to hear myself make a sound. Other days, I cannot bear any noise. The drone of NPR offends me, Beethoven a kind of ringing in my ears. And then I go out and see my friends and have a lovely old time.  But all the while all I want is to be home.

The days and the hours pass.  I am watching the clock.  One year.  I am fine, so far.  I don't know what will happen to me in March. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe everything.

My mother needs me to call her now, to give her some kind of comfort after a big old fight with my sister. But I don't call and I don't write.

I am reading a book about a large family and I see myself in each of the children.

Yesterday, I went to a synagogue in the Lower East Side/Chinatown for a little exhibit called The Last Word where people write on slips of paper things that they wish they'd said.  I got there before Wendy and on a piece of a paper I wrote: "I hope you weren't my last chance." I hesitated a few seconds and then I signed my name -- Zoraya.

I don't know if I meant the lost man or the aborted baby.

When Wendy showed up and started pulling out bits of paper and reading, I wondered if from the hundreds of sheets of paper rolled like cigarettes, would she find me?

Bad Boyfriends and Sam's Mom

Last summer, I lost my mind over someone's sonogram photo of a baby.  I spent last Sunday with the mother of that baby.  The baby's name is Sam and he is a few months old now. His mother is lovely.  Every time I said his name, How is Sam? What's Sam doing? I felt something in me stir -- a pang of love, regret, envy, God knows. 

Ericka is Sam's mother.  She drove to New York from Vermont so that we could help our friend CC move from her boyfriend's condo into a studio apartment a few blocks away.  Three days after a double mastectomy, the boyfriend kicked her out.  I could use my powers of description and turn this into a drama. But that seems gratuitous.

CC now posts the strangest things on Facebook about having hope in the dark and other crap that I've never found comfort in.  I hope all these cliches do something for her because it's pretty obvious that this cancer and boyfriend ordeal may be the worst sorrow of her life.  

Sorrow can only be endured alone, this is what I kept thinking as I packed away CC's things.  I folded her underwear because she can't move her arms--if that were my underwear, I would have run away from embarrassment. Ericka moved furniture that seemed too heavy for her.  Another woman put away kitchen things in a matter of hours.  Four children lifted too many boxes. All of us trying to make a home for someone incapable of doing anything for herself, all of us with good intentions.  But at the end of the weekend when all the boxes were gone and we all went home, CC is still sick and humiliated and helpless. 

"I cannot bear to think of the cruelty at the core of this foul world."

I just read that tonight.  The end of a novel I've been struggling with for weeks.  And it is true, isn't it? I don't want to believe it.  Even as I sit here typing this, I do not quite believe it.  I'm not the negative old bag I make myself out to be -- I am, at heart, hopeful and strong.  

But I worry about CC.  It's frightening to realize that none of us can do anything for her, and this seems like too much all at once.

I am a porcupine.

On Saturday I ran into A in the subway. I was struck by how ordinary our encounter seemed. I was walking down the length of the train and there he was.  I saw him first. I nudged his foot with mine and sat next to him.  After we said goodbye, he called. And then he called again, he emailed, he called, he emailed. It started to piss me off. Last night, I answered. I couldn’t stand his questions about what I’d been doing, I didn’t want to tell him anything. I started off slow and cold. Then something broke and I wanted to tell him everything.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space – this is what I have realized. If A is around, there is no hope for anything with anyone because there is no one I like talking to more, no one who annoys me so much, no one I love, no one who loves me more than he.  No one else I almost had a baby with. That’s a lot to say – even I can see that. None of it is enough to change anything. And there’s no one who replaced me faster than he did. That last sentence is a hypocritical statement. I tried the same thing – I tried to replace him.  The only difference is that he succeeded in finding someone else and I did not.

All these words and those men I fucked are just different ways of missing A. If only we had been brave enough.

I think this time we are going to do it – this is the parting that will stick. I could keep telling myself I’m getting over it and that might even be true. Some days, it is.  As long as he’s around, I’ll keep hoping (though I will probably never admit it to anyone) that he will wake up one day and realize that he loves me enough to take a leap of faith. Intellectually, it’s pretty obvious to me that that’s not going to happen.

As we talked, four and a half hours according to my phone, I realized that we are still very much attached.  It felt good – banter and tenderness. Then I felt demoralized and rather desperate.  That’s when I told him he had to leave me alone. “Help me get over this,” I said.

This is hard for me to write.  It’s an admission of failure in many ways. But it’s my fetus anniversary again.  11 months.  March might find me in worse shape. It took an hour to start typing – I will be embarrassed about this as soon as I post it.

How is it that I can write all this about A and then think about M and hope - naively, sincerely, foolishly - that something will happen between us? Why am I not smarter than this?