Bitter Winter Day

This morning, on the Downtown 2 train, it was very crowded.  There was a bike at rush hour.  Woman 1 got on at 72nd Street.  She shoved me, Woman 2 and everyone else around her.

Woman 2 snarled: "Excuse me."

Woman 1: "Wouldn't you just love it if I got my leg got cut off?"

Woman 2 shakes head. "Jesus."

Woman 1: "You would wouldn't you? You'd be happy."

Woman 2: "Oh give it a rest. 'Wouldn't you just love it if my leg were cut off?' Jesus."

Woman 1: "Shut the fuck up."

Woman 2: "Okay, since you asked me so politely."

Woman 1: "Fuck you."

Woman 2: "Fuck you...." (repeat several more times)

Random little girl I couldn't see: "Mommy, why is everyone so mad?"

Mommy: "When you're older you'll get it."

Random little girl: "Like pubic hair?"

Mommy: "For the love of God, that is inside conversation. Shut up."

Everyone started laughing, even Women 1 and 2. 

Random biker dude: "If anyone touches my motherfucking bike one more time, I'm gonna kill ya'll." 

And the doors opened at 42nd Street.

I never saw the kid or Woman 1's face.  I just saw the back of her head.

Someone left a comment on this blog with a link.  Well, it wasn't a comment, it was an invitation to view Japanese porn or something like that.  Can't that jerk see that this blogger is making an earnest attempt to get a life? 

I saw my shrink yesterday, and (surprise!) I told her things I didn't think I could share. As I was walking to the  bus, I felt resentful of her. 

Reading Anagrams and don't think I will finish it. I'm on page 30-something and there's already been an abortion. Of course, there can't possibly be two abortions in one novel could there?   When I got to the abortion / pregnancy plot line, my heart sank.  I can't even think of another way to say it.  I'm not against it, I don't think it's bad, but I simply do not want to read about it.  Even if it's fiction.  The odd thing is that I keep seeing it.  If I hear about someone who had an abortion and didn't feel that bad, I start to think I'm a freak and that I made the wrong decision. I drive myself crazy trying to quantify the loss of something that was never there. 

It turns out my friend Tom was right -- this whole mess nearing its one year anniversary is going to tear me apart a little. He didn't say it in so many words, but there you have it.

It's time for another good cry. I've been trying for days now but it doesn't seem to be in me anymore. 

I do not want to turn into that woman in the subway. 

Caught Blogging

A fit of paranoia. My cousin saw me writing and asked me if I kept a blog. What could I say? He asked for the address and I refused to give it to him but who knows if he might have gone through my computer later.  He is 17-years-old.  Hardly an innocent at this point, but I don't want to share this.

So I have deleted my photo.

It always surprises me how little I disclose to people, especially when I think of what they share with me. The other night, a friend told me she'd been trying for weeks, without success, to have an orgasm. I know someone who has a massage parlor/happy ending habit. My 17 year old cousin got a blow job in the fitting room of a JC Penney in Glendale. My ex's new girlfriend was a virgin (at 30!) when they met (this knowledge I would pay a pretty penny not to have because this makes me think my ex has no standards). I know someone who has to do everything in multiples of four (the optimum number being 16). I am fascinated by the things people do and how they live and I want to know everything. 

I just realized almost everything I listed has to do with sex.

Saw CC yesterday.  She is in the west coast with her family.  When she returns, someone is throwing her a party. I have no idea how one is supposed to celebrate under the circumstances.  She is getting a double mastectomy in a few weeks.  When we were saying goodbye, we both began to cry. I wished I could be the kind of person who could come up with some positive aphorism but that is where I come up short. All I could do was cry and I felt like I had failed CC in some way.

On my way home from work today, a beautiful girl got on the train at 103rd Street. She belted out an old Donna Summer song called Radio. She sang so well I considered staying on the train just to keep listening even after we arrived at my destination. I gave her five bucks. I don't money to anyone on the subway so that was a first. 

Today is an anniversary. Or close to the day anyway.

NO TEARS.

I even forgot about it. I was tired at work, didn't sleep well so I couldn't concentrate.  But other than than, not much else to report.

No tears!

January

I had one day alone in L.A. because I worked for a few hours at my friend's shop in downtown. If not for the sandwich adventure, there would have been no solitude at all.

After my tour of duty was over, I wandered around in search of this building.  I passed Bunker Hill and the Los Angeles Public Library, walked up the hill of Grand Street and wandered into the MoCA store where I bought a calendar for 2010. Further up was the Disney Music Center.  For years, I've wanted to go there but this was my first time.

 I had dubbed the building Frank's Folly before I ever saw it up close. I think Frank Gehry is silly, the guy people go to if they want something monumental but ultimately end up with something prefabricated. Didn't he already do this in Bilbao? And how are the acoustics? In a way he really is a Los Angeles architect.

That said, this cynical diarist fell a little bit in love. And it was then, standing in front of this building, that I realized that I am a little foolish and a lot romantic.  The kind of person who admits to falling in love with a building, who goes out and buys a calendar with a not-that-great picture of a skinny man whose resolution is to stand up straight, who talks to strangers with hope of hearing about an interesting non-creepy life.

Here is my January man:

and skinny cartoon man's New Year's resolution although I doubt it will be readable in this tiny space:

I was in a sentimental mood, I guess.  I bought a Beethoven CD and some woman named Kristina Train.  If I weren't heartbroken, I would probably find her annoying but now her songs resonate with me, a new way to say what I've been thinking all these months.

M called me on Christmas to say hello and on New Years Day, a few hours after I returned to New York, he came to my 'hood and we ate ice cream in the cold and walked around. Romantic one might say. He showed me the apartment he is buying -- ten blocks south of me.  And the end of the story is this -- still nothing happened.  I guess I would be more surprised if something did happen between us at this point.  We are a done deal, destined to be almost something.

One might ask why *I* don't do something about it. I'm chickenshit hiding behind the excuse of being an old-fashioned kind of girl.  It's pretty simple. And anyway, is he interested at all in me? I was thinking maybe he is a little bit interested -- who the hell calls someone to say Merry Christmas anymore? But then, there is the NOTHING.  So maybe he isn't interested.

Thirty six year old women writes like high school girl.  Jeesh.

So in my nine days in California, I saw my oldest friends, the ones I've dreaded seeing all year.  I saw my relatives.  It was a fucking reunion tour.  And I liked it.  And I loved all those people. And I was so happy to come back to my little apartment.

I didn't freak out at all.  When I saw my friends Daniel and Maya, I was afraid I'd break down. But nothing.  Is that progress or compartmentalizing?  All my friends and their lovely children. And then there was me. I think about it now and I get sad but while I was with my friends, it was fine. I have not lost my ability to be happy for people.

A called while I was in L.A. I didn't answer and I didn't call him back.  Is that progress or is that putting off the inevitable phone call I will make in a few days?  To my credit, I could have called by now and I have not.

I missed him while I was gone.  What a stupid thing to say.  It's not as if I have been not missing him before. What struck me was how I could miss him so much but have no desire to make contact and how whenever he asks me anything, I get angry and share nothing of value. Back to the drawing board, I guess. But I'm a little further along.

Love After Love

Derek Walcott wrote that poem and I first read it years ago in a piece of shit book.  Someone else’s words were the best part of a 400-odd page novel. I ripped that poem out of the book and have had that page somewhere in my apartment for the last four years, something I read once in a while, sometimes out loud.

A called to wish me a Happy Birthday. Three days early.  I think he did it on purpose to show me he’s forgotten or maybe he did forget.  But never mind that.

Happy Abortion Anniversary, Lucy/Reticent Diarist/whatever I am today. And oh my body remembers.  I am sick again.  I almost didn’t cry today.  Maybe one of these months I won’t.

It is cold tonight, the wintery sort of cold that gets in under your skin.  Unmistakably the beginning of another season. I keep track of time in a different way now, as if I feel every change on my skin rather than by what the calendar reads.  I don’t know what all of this means, if anything at all. But I remember what it was like to take a walk in the summertime and in the fall and now when it hurts to breath because it’s so cold. With each season, I am more myself. I am less hurt.

It probably doesn’t sound true because tomorrow I will wake up with puffy eyes and a hoarse voice.  But these episodes pass. And it is less about a lost relationship and more about a baby.

With my shrink last week, I discussed how joy and grief can coexist. I think now that the good times were almost a kind of punishment, it underscored the grief.  The joys of the last few months were so fleeting; and at home at night, it is not what returned to me.

This is what comes to me at night now – sometimes nothing at all, sometimes words from the book I happen to be reading or the memory of someone else’s body. Always there is fear of remembering and forgetting. Both things can’t happen, can it?

I think of jewelry.  I pass by the windows on Madison Avenue and imagine myself plunking down one of my credit cards for something shiny. Not because I need another bauble but because I want a kind of memento for this year, to keep close to me.  That probably sounds morbid and a little bit shallow.  But I would like a little memory to remind myself of something I had but couldn’t keep. Hello, Lou Reed.

Against Epiphanies

That title is from a Charles Baxter essay.  He was talking about the craft of the short story.   I am talking about myself and what is turning out to be the longest story of my life.

Today I went to work for the first time this year.  It went fine but all day I felt awful.  On the way home, I felt the prickle of tears.  In the fucking subway. A woman wearing too-expensive clothes and beautiful taupe shoes losing it in the New York subway.  I managed to keep it together -- this was a bad day but not so awful that I couldn't control myself. I prefer to lose it in public when I am unemployed and wearing ugly clothes and riding the bus.  Never in the subway. Not if I can help it.

At home, on my way to fetch a glass of water in the kitchen, it occurred to me that give or take a few days, it is seven months since the abortion.  Voila.  This is why I broke up with AL on Friday, why I drove him away. This is why I had a terrible day today.  This is why, like a drama queen, I threw myself on my bed and sobbed.  I haven't heard myself make those sounds in a few months. It hurt me to hear myself in such agony. Is that a strange thing to say? It was as if I'd separated from myself.

I called my friend Ann -- an SOS. She didn't know what hit her.

I am tired of this sorrow.  But I am not even past it enough to create new problems for myself, am I? I keep going back.

And I feel awful about AL. I wanted him to make everything better for me. How can I ask that of anyone?

My urge to tell people about the abortion has left me.  I haven't told anyone but AL. It's not that I've run out of people to tell, it's that I've become a bit ashamed of my neediness.  Every person who finds out tried to comfort me and that is all I want.  That is what is impossible to find and might be for a long time.

Day 2 at work tomorrow.  Let's see how well I can fake it.

A Poem (not written by me)

POEM

In a U-Haul North of Damascus

BY DAVID BOTTOMS

1

Lord, what are the sins

I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks,

the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence

and into the woods, the cruelty of silence,

the cruelty of lies, the jealousy,

the indifference?

What are these on the scale of sin

or failure

that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus,

the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence

and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls

on the shoulders of the road. What are these

that they should find me half-lost,

sick and sleepless

behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field

            on Georgia 45

a few miles north of Damascus,

some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers

where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers

and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines?

2

What was I thinking, Lord?

That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip

on direction?

So the jon boat muscled up the ramp,

the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley

chained for so long to the back fence,

the scarred desk, the bookcases and books,

the mattress and box springs,

a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair

of three-way speakers, everything mine

I intended to keep. Everything else abandon.

But on the road from one state

to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance,

a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl

shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs

spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum

like the bedsheet that morning long ago

just before I watched the future miscarried.

Jesus, could the irony be

that suffering forms a stronger bond than love?

3

Now the sun

streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads

of light drawing highways in the dew-cover.

I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air,

the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell

of asphalt and diesel fumes.

But mostly pine and rain

as though the world really could be clean again.

Somewhere behind me,

miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across

west Georgia, light is falling

through the windows of my half-empty house.

Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care

so long after everything has fallen

to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone?

Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded

before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall

toward grace? Could I be moved

to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

Five Months

Today is it five months since the abortion. I don't know if I ever said when I did it. Maybe I lied before, made it seem like more time has passed.

Sometimes, I'm not so consistent. I don't mean to lie.  

This morning, I told my ex A (via email) that I was sick over the weekend. He called me in a panic wanting to know if I had a fever, what my temperature was, if I was going to see a doctor, if I had food, etc.  Nice boyfriend stuff from my very nice and definitely EX boyfriend.  It was lovely to be thought of and now I feel awful about it.

See, I did it on purpose. I was being manipulative. I wanted to hear his voice today. It's funny that I didn't even realize what I was doing until I heard the phone ring.  We talked for ten minutes. I told him I was fine.  I never mentioned the abortion at all.

I want to talk about how hard it is to know that two people love each other but have to separate.  That seems like the most logical paragraph to compose.  And I do think about that.  I also think a lot about how he didn't love me enough. Is that true?  I don't know.

Five months -- I can hardly stand it.