Best Of

I love Year In Review lists.

Over the course of the past day I've enthusiastically devoured "Best of 2013" lists for books, gaffes, quotes, music, film, tech, women, longform journalism, and trips, just to name a few.

Combined with my weird excitement over holidays that require us to be introspective, I really anticipated writing this post to be, well, easy. A few quick looks at blog stats, some meditation on my personal journal, and I'd have a few Zen sentences to drop in here before heading off to put on a short dress and dance with my friends until midnight.

How come these things never work out the way you want them to?

Part of it, I suspect, is because 2013 was (and here my flashy vocabulary is failing me).

2013 was the biggest emotional clusterfuck of my life.

I met my favorite author and discovered my nana had breast cancer and biked a 150 miles across the state of Minnesota. I had great sex and terrible sex and wondered if I was going to be single for forever and hoped that I wouldn't have to settle down any time soon. I traveled to St. Louis and D.C. and spent more than my usual amount of time thinking about freedom and self-determination. I went to weddings for the people I love most in the world. I danced to "Call Your Girlfriend" and "Get Lucky" more times than I can count, argued about whether or not "Blurred Lines" is rapey. I argued about women in science and listened to jazz in the oldest jazz club in the United States. I drank scotch in my apartment and argued about modern feminism.I argued a lot. I smoked cigars next to a fire in Northern Minnesota and looked at the stars and talked about the impossibility of our own existence. I fell for someone. I fell out with someone.  I changed jobs, changed cities, changed directions.

As I said, an emotional clusterfuck.

For as cliched and ridiculous as it sounds, I learned so much over the past year about myself and my relationships and my mental health. I think about how I when I toast the coming of the new year tonight, I will be a profoundly, deeply different woman than the one who rang in last New Year with a panic attack.

I am a different, better person than I was a year ago.

The problem, of course, is that all of those revelations turned out to be far more personal than I had intended. And the prospect of writing about them here is just  . . . too much. For the time being, they're best left in my journal and in my head, percolating for 2014.

That said, the one revelation I'm all right talking about is this: I am surrounded by some of the smartest, kindest, most loving people in the world.  Chances are strong that if you're reading this, I know you extremely well. Because of that, let me break the fourth wall for a moment and say, simply,

Thank you.

In a thousand small ways over the past year, you have changed and saved my life. There really aren't words for the kind of love and support I've received, and it would take less of a hack than I am to talk about my gratitude and love.

So instead just trust that in some small way, your love and friendship is reflected on my personal "Best of 2013" list.

Heart

How's your heart today?

It's supposed to be an innocuous question. A quick query dropped into a work day before someone sends me a poem that he anticipates will make my heart explode. It's innocuous because I've been blathering on about the book I've been reading lately and how intense it's been. Reading the book feels simultaneously like having someone run a cheese grater over your heart and presenting you with a bowl of the result and getting a hug from a good friend who is suddenly in your life after living abroad for two years.

Anyway, the question hits me with all the force of a car accident. It's casually devastating in a way I won't be able to articulate for a few days at least.

***

My have (a) friend(s) who tell(s) me I'm a reactive person.

It's not (I think, I hope) a value judgement. It's merely a statement of fact. You react more to things than other people.

I heard it most recently and in not so many words on Sunday. I was sitting on my running partner's couch, wrapped up in a fluffy blanket and reading Love Minus Eighty.

And just sobbing. 

In the kitchen one of my friends (graciously making me dinner while I had a breakdown on his couch) said: "I think Kel's book is making her cry."

The immediate reply was "I don't think that's entirely unusual."

***

I do not understand my male friends.

They are often the ones who call me reactive, who tease me about how I responded to Much Ado About Nothing or who ask about my mood before they send me a poem by Auden or who pull a puzzled face when I'm bawling on the couch over a novel. 

I live in the Upper Midwest, the goddamn capital of emotionally reserved men, so I suppose it shouldn't come as such a surprise to me that the majority of the men in my life are bemused when I do some exuberant thing.

I adore brainy, cerebral guys, so I suppose it shouldn't come as such as surprise to me that the majority of the men in my life are bemused when I burst into tears during every episode of season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

It doesn't fucking matter. 

Every single time one of my male friends expresses bewilderment over an emotional reaction to something I end up open-mouthed. 

Lord, I know how this sounds. Like I'm trying to write a romantic comedy. But the older I get and the more men come into and out of my life the more I wonder: 

Do men all have the emotional capacity of Peter Pan? 

***

My favorite book of poetry isn't Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. It's not Ballistics by Billy Collins or The Duino Elegies by Rilke. My favorite book of poetry is Good Poems for Hard Times as edited by Garrison Keillor. 

I love the book for a lot of reasons. The poems collected in it are fabulous. They actually make you feel better when you're down. My mom discovered it once while riding in my car and made marginalia on a few of the poems that delights me when I stumble across it. I had it signed after a particularly wonderful night seeing A Prairie Home Companion (and one of my favorite bands!) for my birthday with two people I love very much. 

The thing that I love most about it is G.K.'s introduction. I know, I know. What a weird thing to love, but I do. It's full of bits that I carry around inside of me and call to mind when I'm upset. My favorite bit though is a question that has little to do with what poetry should be or how poetry can change your life. It's a casual aside in a long paragraph and asks only: 

How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart?

***

For years I thought that what I wanted, what I needed in a partner was someone a little cool. A little distant. Someone who didn't quite have as many emotions. That's how relationships are supposed to work, right? You're supposed to make up for the deficiencies in one another. If I insist--and I do--upon being so reactive I need someone who isn't going to be. 

Fuck that. 

I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of a girl. I don't know how to be any other way. I don't want to be any other way. I want to go star-gazing and shout with delight when I catch a shooting star. I want to be so moved by a concert that when I wake up the next day I've lost my voice and hurt all over from dancing so hard. 

More than that, I'm the kind of girl who regularly offers something from the heart. My default setting is that if you've made it in under my defenses, I'm going to love you. Inconveniently, stupidly, (disturbingly?), completely. I'm going to offer you a thousand microscopic pieces of my heart in words and songs and books. In late night conversations about God and cross-country road trips. 

And . . . I'm finally ready to admit it. That kind of life isn't one for someone with the emotional capacity of Peter Pan. I don't need someone's heart to explode during Wagon Wheel or to stop breathing while watching Shakespeare. But I need someone who is going to understand why those things happen to me without looking so damn confused. 

I need someone who won't have to ask how's your heart today? 

Love, Love, Love

For the majority of my life I thought ee cummings was a hack.

I'm not, you know, proud of it, but I did. I've always belonged to the school of "poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of" and cummings, from the time I first read him as a child (which was probably my first mistake) seemed like someone less interested in telling a story and more interested in being clever.

Until recently.  Until Kerry sent me a reading of May I Feel, Said He.

Woah. Good Poetry.

***

"The issue is the lexical gap." 

In almost any other circumstance I would instantly be embarrassed by the fact that this sentence came tumbling out of my mouth. But it's late, I'm among friends, and we've been up and talking for hours. There's a pause in the conversation and someone interjects:

"Have you thought at all about the Greek?"

There's are a lot of things I love about having friends who are theologians. For the record, there are a lot of things I love about having friends with esoteric interests. But theologians are nice because they have access to Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew.

And because they like to drink scotch and talk into the wee hours of the morning. 

This is one of those conversations. As a former theologian and generally sort of curious person, I can sit up and talk academic theology for hours. As someone who spends a not insignificant part of her life wishing she could believe in God in some capacity, I can sit up all night and talk about the soul's desire for union with the Divine, about the emotional parts of faith, about knowing in your gut that there is a God who loves you.

Anyway, the conversation has been winding on for hours, there's been a fair amount of yelling (me, of course), some pounding on the table to make a point, and at times five-minute long breakdowns into laughter. This is precisely the kind of evening I love, the kind of socializing where I feel most at home and most like myself.

As I'm not writing a dissertation or teaching high school students theology, I don't have much to contribute to those bits of the conversation, but eventually things turn to my life and work. I touch on how fulfilling work has been and how much I like where I'm living. We get into writing for awhile and I confess that I feel stuck. I've been doing a lot of writing about Love, and I feel like I'm starting the repeat myself. The issue is, of course, that the writing I want to do about Love isn't necessarily about ohmygodILOVEYOU love. I mean, yeah, I'm single and really fucking angsty about it, so a fair amount is pretty emo, but there are people and things I love and want to write about, but language is failing me. Hence the lexical gap. And the suggestion to look to the Greek. The conversation doesn't linger here too long, we're almost instantly on C.S. Lewis's book The Four Loves, and then to his friendship with Tolkien and then to books we covet. 

But the thought of the Greek keeps me up even after I've ushered everyone out into the snowy evening and ensured that they have means of getting home. 

Yes. I am exactly the kind of person who is kept up at night by lexical gaps and Ancient Greek.

***

I seem to have accidentally memorized the poem [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)]. 

I have, over the course of a few years, attempted to memorize a few poems. They feel very much like prayers and come to me in much the same fashion. When I'm foundering on at work, the first lines of Sonnet XXIX come to mind. When I'm upset about a relationship, I repeat Mary Oliver's "The Uses of Sorrow" to myself under my breath. When I'm frustrated by how the world is GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL and shouting about how the Boomers have just bitched everything for us, I recall the line "Love someone who does not deserve it" from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front." 

Memorizing this poem by ee cummings came as a surprise. 

Shortly after Kerry sent me "May I Feel, Said He" I was helping some friends choose readings for their wedding. As a former poet and poetry enthusiast, I was pulling up a number of love poems. The poems, however, didn't feel much like the couple, so I bookmarked a few of them to enjoy later. But the cummings, for whatever reason, has stuck in my head like the hook from a great pop song. 

i carry your heart with me. (i carry it in my heart)

Over the past weeks I've wanted to use that line more times than I can count. The problem, of course, is that [i carry your heart (i carry it in)] is a LOVE poem. It's a poem you would read at someone's wedding. It's the kind of poem I can imagine tumbling out of my mouth after a long evening in with someone I'm dating (I'm more fun than this makes me sound, I promise.)

But I can't stop thinking about the poem. And I nearly recite the line over the phone as a good friend tells me about a gut-wrenching breakup. I think about it when someone else tells me about a family member diagnosed with a terminal illness. I actually write it in a card I'm sending to a friend going through a rough spot before thinking it might be a little overblown and rewriting the whole damn thing.  

***

Lexical gaps annoy the hell out of me.

Of course they do. I write for a living. I emote for a hobby. I've been told that I feel things more deeply than most people. So I need to know that there are words to express whatever the hell it is that I'm feeling. 

The lexical gap for love annoys me more than most. I need a word that means "We're related and I care about you, so I will always buy you remote controlled robots for Christmas and if you're ever in jail I'll come bail you out." I need another that means "I will spend an entire Sunday helping you Keratin treatment your hair and watching Game of Thrones (probably giving myself cancer in the process). " I need another one that means "Every time I think about you I want you here, now, so we can [censored] and then spend the rest of the night talking about modern literature and feminism and cracking up over terrible puns." 

But I don't have any of those words. I've got a big, ridiculous lexical gap that I can't fill. And as much as I would like those words, as much as I not-so-secretly want to employ the Ancient Greek, it isn't coming back into vogue any time soon. So instead I find myself repeating the simple truth behind all these kinds of love.

I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart.

Turns out cummings wasn't as much of a hack as I thought. 

Idiot

The alarm beeps and brings me around breathy, edgy, and completely furious.

It's a Monday morning and I've spent what feels like the entire night dreaming, well, one of those dreams.  It starts the way those dreams always start  ohbabyI'msosorryIwassuchanidiot. It (d)evolves the way those dreams always do and when the alarm rousts me I swear I can still feel his lips and teeth on my skin and I desperately wish there was enough time to go for an extremely fast, frigid, five mile run.

Dreaming about men from your past is awful.

Dreaming about men from your past and waking up edgy to a Monday morning is worse.

Dreaming about men from your past and waking up edgy to a Monday morning alone is the absolute, unequivocal ohmygodthefucking worst. It's a punishment of Dante-esque proportions and I slam out of the house entirely pissed.

***

"This may be a bigger picture question, but why do you need to say anything?"

Carliene pauses and adds "That's a social worker AND friend question." 

Social workers, it turns out, make excellent friends. 

I said it last winter, after Carliene and Krista came up and took care of me when I was incapable of taking care of myself. I think it again, nearly a year later while Carliene and I are in the midst of a long walk. Not the best at navigating relationships in any capacity, I am in the process of attempting to ford the goddamn Rubicon of relationships. I'm no Caesar (not even a lesser), and need to bounce some of what I've been thinking off of someone who is . . . better at emotions? Isn't quite so myopic when it comes to another person's perceptions? Just isn't me?

"I'm better." 

She doesn't say anything, so I plow ahead. "I am better because of what happened. In a significant, measurable way. But I don't know how to say something like that without sounding like I'm a bunny boiler."

"Have you considered not saying anything?"

"I can't. I've become a blurter. If I don't say something it'll accidentally come tumbling out anyway."

"That's pretty unfortunate."

"Don't I know it."

***

My heart is an idiot. 

This is the thought my rational brain will have when it checks back in. For the moment, God alone knows where it went.  I'm on the floor, rocking back and forth screaming into a pillow. There's an Adele album on the radio (I never claimed originality) and even if my face wasn't covered with a pillow, I'd have a hard time breathing.

In a few years, I'll be in a therapist's office, pointing to this exact moment as the moment when I gave up. When I decided that everything was "a whole lot of nothing worth losing or getting back." But that'll be years from now. For the time being I'm screaming into the pillow and trying not to make myself sick.  The truth is, I'm howling over something I should just ohmygodbeoveralready. 

Someone I loved married someone else. 

That's it. 

And let's be clear. He was, objectively, not good for me. We had a deeply unhealthy relationship, and at the end, I didn't even like him very much. But despite not liking him some small part of me still loved him. Very much. And that small part of me (the part I would like to abandon mid-blizzard on the prairie) maybe-always-just-a-little-bit hoped that he'd show up some day and say "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry. I was such an idiot." 

Let's get real. My heart or lizard brain or whatever took over driving during that period of my life was unfathomably stupid. Because every single damn warning sign was there. Peter Pan Syndrome. Indecisiveness. Snobbish taste in books and music. An inability to just return a phone call or text. Aloofness. A million other giant, red-flashing "ACHTUNG" signs. 

But (have I mentioned that my heart is an idiot?) all it took was one smile. One smart comment about a book I was reading. One self-deprecating remark about being so scrawny and I fell inconveniently, irrationally, unwisely in love. 

Idiot.

***

At almost 30 I fall in love a lot less easily than I did in my early 20s. 

It's inevitable, I suppose. You go through bad breakups and not so bad breakups, and you learn how to recognize the reasons why something won't work (emotionally stunted, lives on another continent, gay) and figure out how you're going to isolate all those stupid, swoopy stomach feelings and move on. You learn how to put your guard up. 

Your heart becomes somewhat less of an idiot. 

Until it isn't.

Until someone walks into your life, slips in under your guard, and maybe they don't quite turn your world upside down, but they turn your perception of yourself upside down. Suddenly you're no longer the girl who specializes in unhealthy relationships who is now a little bit crazy because of them, but someone else entirely. Someone who is funny and smart and just a tiny bit desirable. And in the midst of your life feeling very How Stella Got Her Groove Back you think to yourself. "This is a mistake. I'm going to get hurt." 

And you do. You do get hurt because that's what happens. But somehow this time you can walk out of it not saying "My heart is an idiot" but "I am better. In significant, measurable ways."

Hopefully without sounding like a bunny boiler. 

What's in My Journal

I keep a Commonplace Book.

It's one of the journals I keep in addition to this blog, my journal, and my book journal. I don't usually carry it on me, but it's there, on my bookshelf, waiting to be added to when something catches my attention or consulted when I need advice.

In it among the poems, song lyrics, proverbs, bon mots, and other intellectual flotsam, is a list that I'm saving for the children in my life--whether those children end up being biological kids or the ones to whom I am an aunt in some capacity--it's a list full grown-up advice that I wish someone had taught me.

***

A couple of articles from The Atlantic have caught my attention recently. One of the them talks about what Freud termed "Screen Memories," or memories of events that never actually happened (which in itself happens with surprising frequency). The second discusses how depression impacts our memories and impairs our ability to form memories. The articles catch my attention for a couple reasons. The first is that I want to understand the science behind how our memories are formed (and, consequently, how we can manage to create false memories). 

The second reason I am drawn to the articles is  incredibly self-serving. 

I, well, I don't make my living as a memoirist, but I devote a significant amount of time to first-person writing about my life and experiences. And until recently, I had stopped keeping a journal for myself, so any record I have of the past five years has to be pieced together from entries here, emails, and my memory.

As high school history teachers love to pronounce, those who do not to understand history are doomed to repeat it. Yeah, brilliant, thanks AP history. But what the fuck are you supposed to do when the history itself is in question?

The issue, of course, is an obvious one, the kind that you would ask while awake past 2am in a dorm. But regardless of the fact that it's a little sophomoric, it's still deeply troubling to me.

Without the aid of my journal, everything about the past year--past five years, really--has a certain air of based upon a true story about it. Which is precisely what I do not want when thinking about my life as a writer or even as someone trying to keep from making the same mistakes year after year.

***

I expected adulthood to be more fun.

I did. Even as I was transitioning into it, I anticipated that it would be good dates with charming, brilliant men who would automatically adore me. I thought it would be gala nonprofit events and saving the world and paying off my student loans with ease. I thought it would be learning to salsa dance and have sexy hips despite being a Midwesterner with a negative sense of rhythm.

Now with the benefit of a few years of actual adulthood under my belt, I realize that there was something terribly inevitable about working incredibly hard for a nonprofit salary, about worrying over things like cholesterol and blood sugar, about budgeting and menu planning, about doing strengthening exercises for my weak and decidedly unsexy hips, about all the tedious stuff that comprises being a grown-up.

Recently I asked a group of my friends "When was the last time you thought to yourself 'I really enjoy being an adult?'" 

There were a variety of answers. Last weekend, when I was out until 3am dancing. When I proposed to my fiancee. When our daughter was born. 

I have two answers to the question. One I will take to my grave. My second, and the one that I give when they turn the question back on me is:

"Some time in late August. I had just moved into my new place and decided to bake a chocolate cake for no reason. I spent the evening baking, listening to Miles Davis, and when I was finished I sat down and had watermelon for dinner." 

"What the hell kind of an answer is that?"

"A true one."

***

Here's the truth, at least, as far as I can recall it.

The past year has been insane.

I didn't realize how insane it was until I sat down and started (self-indulgently) to go through the writing I did from August 2012 (mental health diagnosis) until present (revisiting mental health diagnosis). Revisiting those writings hasn't been about fussing about the writing (that's happened) or being excessively proud of a particular piece (that's happened too). It's been about reading the piece and thinking "Jesus. Next time say yes to the free trip to New Orleans right away." or "Avoid doing the tarantella on someone's heart."

It's the first time I've been able to look back on a period of my life say "Yes, this is when I learned what it means to be a grown-up."

***

The true measure of a good cook is what they can make on a budget, so learn to be inventive in the kitchen early. Know the warning signs of abusive relationships and how to leave them. Cheap alcohol gives you terrible hangovers. "Your life must been a open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in." Work and vocation are not the same thing, learn the difference. There is no substitute for good jazz. Go to funerals. When two people you love divorce, remain friends with both of them if possible. Read a poem every day. Learn what to do when you say "I love you" and the other person says "I don't love you." Break up with people (friendships, relationships, family) carefully. You will occasionally inhabit a universe where 1+3=a pineapple, and rationality will not touch it.

This is how my grown-up advice page in the Commonplace Book starts. 

***

I'm in the middle of unpacking the last of my non-book boxes this afternoon (one of those tedious, adult tasks that I never quite seem to get around to), thinking about memory and writing, considering the past year and the growing up that's happened, when a poem by William Stafford pops into my head and makes me realize that regardless of how events in the past year actually occurred, the growing up that I did, those lessons I carefully noted in my Commonplace Book are all still true. 

I set the pile of boxes next to the door and grab the Commonplace Book off the shelf. On the page next to the grown-up advice, I start another list. "Adult Life Will Not Always Be Fun: Some of the Inevitably Tedious Things You Will Have to Accomplish." The list is, of course, easier to make than I would wish, but at the end of it, I smile, hoping that in the future some wide-eyed 18 year old will read it, scoff, and hopefully still take away a piece of advice or two.

Before I close the book I turn back to grown-up advice and add a few lines. Don't trust your memory, keep a journal. Looking back years late you may find that it contains someone's terribly inevitable life story. Maybe your own.

Patterns

I like books as much, and often times more, than I like people.

It's one of those facts that I've known about myself for more or less my entire life. As a middle school student, I would read at recess. I used to climb up onto the side of the chimney at my childhood home because there was a ledge there large enough to curl up on, hide from my parents, and fall into a book. As a college and graduate student, I still made time to read outside of class because I knew it would help me preserve the vestiges of my sanity. So of course, I've been geekily into all the "Girls Who Read" things floating about the internet lately.

It's not that I don't like people. Of course I do. But people are, frankly, terrifying. All those emotions, thoughts, opinions. All those opportunities to do something wrong. I am, in addition to being one of the most introverted people I know, one of the shyest. These two things are almost a guaranteed one-two K.O. for making new friends, as meeting new people both exhausts and scares the beejezus out of me.

Books, of course, offer all the the emotional catharsis of, you know, real life minus all of the tricky interpersonal navigation that has to come along with actual human interaction.

***

Patterns, for people with OCD, are vital. 

Patterns help us stave off psychological panic. They keep the world in order around us and allow us to function during the course of our days. So we count to one hundred or recite the ABCs when we're upset. We touch brick walls when we pass them, check door locks and irons, eat the same breakfast every morning at the same time. All the while preserving, hopefully, some ability to leave the house in the morning and go to work and lead successful, adult lives. I got a graduate degree, passed my comprehensive exams with honors, and raised nearly a million dollars for an organization while suffering from ever-increasing OCD compulsions. 

Patterns allowed me to do so.

***

I've become a blurter. 

For years I've successfully managed to tamp down my emotions. Or, possibly simply become a Vulcan and not have emotions. When my mental health began to crumble, I stopped journaling and have zero record of my emotional state during that period in my life, and I don't trust my memories. What I do know is that if  I had them, I kept my emotions under control. Feelings for someone who clearly didn't have them back? Shove them down the memory hole. Pissed at a friend of yours for canceling plans last minute? Go for a long walk. Sad and guilty because your grandfather died and you failed to see him over Thanksgiving because you were lazy? Tell exactly one person literally sworn to secrecy (your priest) and then never speak of the incident again. 

Last fall I was writing frequently about how I felt like I was walking around with my skin turned inside out. All of the emotions that I had spent so long avoiding were suddenly flooding back in and I didn't have the capacity to deal with them, so I felt overwhelmed and vulnerable most of the time. Apparently, over the course of the year, my solution to those emotions has been to blurt them out, often in public places.

This particular section of blurting comes on a Saturday night in the middle of a Kitchen Window. 

Victoria and I are looking a tea towels and I start emoting, big time. A cookbook has triggered a desire to talk to a (former) friend and I'm upset about the fight we've had (while still convinced that what I did was right) and miss them tremendously and just want to send them a photo of this completely ridiculous cookbook and fast-forward to the part where I'm done processing and one of us has apologized and we're back to being friends again. 

I'm still telling Victoria all of this ten minutes later when we hit the sidewalk. 

***

It's not unusual for me to finish a book in less than 24 hours. 

Most recently it was a novel, Something Missing, by Matthew Dicks. It was a funny, sweet book. It had a few structural problems (I doubt anyone's first meeting with an estranged father would go that well) but I was willing to overlook them for one simple reason.

The book was one of the kindest, best, most sympathetic looks into the mind of a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder I've ever encountered. It was like reading my own thought patterns on the page, everything from obsessing over conversations that you've had or will have and refining your answers until they're perfect to the deep sense of relief and calm that you feel when you finally walk into your own space. 

It was that last part that really hit home with me, a long description of what our hero feels when he walks into his pine air-freshener scented garage primarily because when I shut the door of the apartment and am surrounded by my things, my books, my pottery, my music, that I feel an overwhelming sense of thankgodnothingbadtomecanhappenhere. 

Oddly enough, that feeling has never been about place. It's always been about the things with which I surround myself. The quilt on my bed, the deep red armchair where I do most of my reading, my coffee mug my friend Richard gave me, the smell of lavender and vanilla in the air. 

Reading Something Missing was like getting slapped across the face. 

I've thought for a long time now that OCD was, in total, about the obsessions and compulsions that I deal with. When I thought of those things, I thought about the stove, the door, the iron, the fact that every time I'm driving down the freeway I can't stop thinking about how I'm about to crash into the concrete median and die. What I didn't realize was how deeply patterns were ingrained into my life. How my need for privacy and things to be just so in my house without being tidy or organized is a manifestation of this disease. 

How that deep sense of relief and calm that comes when I flick the deadbolt is about staving off psychological panic. 

***

People interrupt patterns. 

I'm having a moment of existential crisis after an email with the subject line "Run Tonight?" pops up in my inbox. It's from my running partner, we skipped our long run on Sunday and he wants to know if we can make it up tonight. 

I run alone on Mondays. It's a short, fast two mile run around my neighborhood right after work. I run without the encumbrance of a cell phone, headphones, music. I just run. My running partner and I run on Wednesdays and Sundays. That's our time. I depend on those days because I know I'll have enough time for recovery and strengthening my weak hips in between. 

I run alone on Mondays.  

I hesitate a few minutes before sending back a one word response. 

"Yes." 

***

Marie Curie Day finds me entirely fired up and ready for thirteen rounds of intellectual bare-knuckle boxing with anyone willing to fight me. I am not, however, fired up about anything even remotely topical. It's not women in science or the preponderance of science events "just for women" that has me riled up. It's an article by a pretentious blowhard in The New York Review of Books. 

He claims (and for the record, he says that these claims only hold true in his own life) that the novel has lost its meaning. That we trick ourselves through fake catharsis, or are disappointed when our own lives don't following the similar arc of introduction, issue, resolution, emotionally satisfying denouement. 

I read literary criticism. Frequently. I can expound on Stanley Fish, dissect Kate Millet, explain Focault's author function. Lit crit classes were my favorite classes in college and were the capstone of my liberal arts education. I went to one of those colleges that wanted to teach you how to think, and lit crit did that for me.

This is all to say that I, too, am a pretentious blowhard.

But I've never made the claim that "because I dislike this form (or author or conceit) the entire genre lacks meaning." And I've never gone on to publish invective against whole genres in magazines (mainly because they wouldn't publish me). What really gets me, though, is the fact that I've had this argument so damn often lately.

I read almost exclusively fiction and poetry among a group of loud non-fiction advocates. Despite the fact that I love history, most historical non-fiction bores me. I don't like memoir (probably because I write it), and I understand science better when someone explains it to me and I can ask questions.

Those are part of the reasons I read fiction.

The other part is that fiction has changed and saved my life. Sandman made me feel something long after I had I thought I lost the capability to feel anything. Pride and Prejudice regularly gives me hope that I may not die old and alone.

Something Missing has made me realize that people interrupt patterns.

They do. With wanton disregard for schedules they invite you out to happy hour at the last minute. They forget to RSVP to dinner and arrive regardless. They rummage around in your bookshelves and forget to put things back in alphabetical order. They invite you to run on Mondays instead of Sundays, they take you to Kitchen Window and listen as you mope all over the store. They blow into your well-ordered life for a weekend or a month or fifteen years and spin your life completely, irrevocably, out of control.

People interrupt patterns.

They show you what life without patterns, without rituals and rules and set times and activities can be like. You run on Monday and still manage to do your hip-strengthening exercises. You kiss a stranger and live to tell about it. You share your feelings with a friend in a hugely public space without giving a damn that you're close to tears.You rearrange the books on the shelf and categorize them based on the impact they made on your life rather than by author's last name.

You realize that there's a slim chance you're starting to like people more than books.

California Dreamin', Minnesota Home

I have a California-themed playlist.

It's employed only to avert Weather Related Madness. Say, for example, it's November 11th-12th and it's suddenly cold enough to be February. February. Or it's snowing in September. Or April. Or it's the sixteenth straight day of subzero temperatures and despite the fact that that you really love Minnesota Jesusgodthisweatheristedious. 

That's when I turn on the California Dreamin' playlist.

It is, if I do say so myself, a good one. A nice mix of the expected (The Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding) and the slightly more unexpected (Jeffery Focault's cover of "Lodi." Rilo Kiley's "Let Me Back In."). It usually serves to pull me back off the edge. After a listen or two I can set myself back to my normal winter pursuits: building a model whaling ship while listening to Moby Dick, baking, eating my weight in simple carbs, winter running strictly to feel superior.

***

You know the feeling of stepping off a plane and immediately falling in love with a place? Instantly getting vacation high because you're somewhere that's new and interesting and (hello, I live in Minnesota and travel in the winter) warm? God, what a great feeling, having a new city woo you with its jazz clubs and rare bookstores and people who don't elongate their vowels (I discovered this week I can no longer say the word "bars" properly). It's a great feeling, one of my favorite things about travel. But I'm usually happiest at the end of the vacation when, exhausted and completely satisfied, I get back on the plane to come home.

Don't get me wrong. I'll be in New Orleans again this winter. If I had an extra $200.00 in my checking account, I'd be spending Thanksgiving wandering around D.C.. Chicago will always have a special place in my heart. I could rattle around Lower Queen Anne in Seattle on my own for hours. I still have dreams about Beijing and Lima.

But then there are those cities where you deplane and it's just . . . different, somehow.

San Francisco was the closest to love-at-first-sight I've ever been in my life.

It was, I suppose, inevitable. When I boarded my plane in Minneapolis there was a snowstorm bearing down and promises of a foot of snow. In April. When I hopped off the plane in San Francisco it was sunny and sixty-five. BART was, for a girl who was living the middle of a cornfield, surprisingly easy to navigate. I heard live jazz for the first time while I was there. I bought a copy of Howl at City Lights Bookstore (swoon) and then drank too much California wine sitting next to the ocean.

And Redwoods. Oh, my Sweet Jesus. Redwoods.

It was (is) hard to keep from comparing San Francisco to the windswept, icy prairie. Even without the heaps of ice and snow, the thirty-mile an hour wind gusts, the -40 temperatures before windchill, California outstrips Minnesota in one crucial way.

There is nothing sexy about Minnesota.

I love this state with every fiber of my being, but we don't have a whole lot going on here to brag on. Ok, yes, we're usually ranked in the top for healthiest states in the nation. We have decent public education, several Fortune 500 companies, the Mississippi Headwaters, Garrison Keillor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, but none of those are things that you would travel here to see. Minnesota is, by its very nature, cold, uninviting, and a little standoffish.

California, oh, California. No one once bothered to say "Oh, you aren't from around here, huh?" (Probably because it was crystal clear once you looked at my hair.) No one talked about the weather. I never once heard someone ask "Oh, so how spicy is it?" Everyone was preposterously good-looking, no one looked like they hadn't seen the sun for the past four months, there were bike paths and runners everywhere.

California is, it goes without saying, sexy.

***

I am rubbish at relationships.

There. I finally admitted it. I'm not single because I choose to be. I'm not single because I have anxiety or OCD or because the men in whatever city I'm living in suck. I am single because I am stunningly, breathtakingly awful at relationships. I get nervous during sex. I have a tendency to smush all of my emotions down until I accidentally (and usually inappropriately) blurt them out. Last weekend, I stayed in and read The New Yorker, drank herbal tea, and went to bed before 8pm. I hate making new friends, have never, ever made a good impression on anyone's mother, flatly refuse to introduce men to my parents, and tweak out about ohmygodmyindependence usually around month three.

I am fucking awful at relationships.

I am somehow, impossibly, equally awful at, uh, microrelationships (the ones that last between twelve and fourteen hours). I'm usually convinced someone is a serial killer and even if they pass the Not A Serial Killer Test (Don't ask me. I don't know what it is) I have to contend with the Crushing Former Catholic Guilt and Regret and 9.9999999 times out of 10, I'm reasonably confident it's not going to be worth it (Ugh, neck tattoos, seriously?) and just refuse to even try.

Let's not even get into friendships. I owe everyone who has known me for more than three years a cake, a bottle of wine, and some PTSD counseling.

You know what interpersonal relationships I'm great at? Where I unequivocally shine?

Flings.

Give me something with an expiration date, no shorter than a week and no longer than a month, and I will be the smartest, funniest, sexiest girl a guy has ever been with in his life. I don't like to brag (who am I kidding, I love to brag) but if we don't have longer than 31 days, when I finally drop him at the airport or hop the train back to the Cities, he'll think of me wistfully as the girl who got away. It's because I get a chance to be funny and sweet. I just get to be the good bits of me, the non or charmingly neurotic bits. There's a touch of emotional connection, certainly more than a microrelationship (all right, one night stand) but I don't have to tell him that I work too much, that I have all these wires crossed in my head, that I spend large parts of my day in silence or talk to myself or that I have on more than one occasion let the dirty laundry situation get so out of control that I've gone to buy new underwear rather than go to the laundromat.

Anyway, the girl who got away.

It's true. I've got the love letters to prove it.

That last part is a lie. I did receive love letters (or in one memorable case, a thank you card) but I didn't keep them. Because the thing I love best about flings, the thing that makes me so fucking good at them is the ability to walk away. At the end of the week or two or three I can delete a number from my cell phone, spend two or three days feeling wistful, and then go on with my life, maybe remembering the guy for a breathless moment or two throughout the years.

Flings are sexy.

Trust me, I know exactly how this sounds

***

Commuting to work today in the nearly zero degree temperatures (in November, I ask you) I cued up my California Dreamin’ playlist. And it helped, a little. Mainly it made me think about airline tickets and the fact that my favorite nonprofit on the face of the Earth is located in San Francisco. Also about wine and good chocolate and nearby Redwoods and the North Beach neighborhood. I wondered if Duluth really was a fluke, and if I relocated to a bigger city I could be happy on my own, if I could make friends in a city like San Francisco.

The playlist fades out on The Decemberists's "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade," hands down one of my all-time favorite songs. Before reaching into my pocket to restart the list, I flip my coat collar up and pull my hat down tighter over my ears, cursing the fact that my hair is going to be flat by the time I get to the office. When a new song rather unexpectedly starts I realize I've left myself an Easter egg, a protection against too much wistfulness over something I can't have.

Minnesota isn't sexy. It isn't.  How could it be with so many lefse recipes and so few natural tans? But here's the thing, despite the fact that I had tons of fun in San Francisco, that I think of it and look up plane tickets a few times every year, I haven't been back. I've been to Seattle (twice), Portland, Denver, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, and Chicago in the intervening years, but I've never made the trip back to San Francisco. It's a revelation that might sting, but for the Arctic wind that's wormed its way into my heavy coat. I pull off my sweater mittens and reach into my pocket, switching the music over to Trampled by Turtles and already arranging a decidedly unexciting, unsexy, but quietly, reliably, wonderful "My Minnesota Home" playlist in my mind.

Amen. Alleluia.

My apartment smells like homemade funfetti cake. It's clean, at least, as long as you don't open the closets. Miles Davis is playing ballads on the radio. 

"Oh my God!" One of two favorite former roommates walks into my apartment. She and her husband are not normally this effusive but within fifteen seconds of them entering I'm introduced to their daughter, hugged, and told "Your apartment is so cute! It smells so good in here! You look incredible." I warm up, almost instantly. I've been simultaneously excited for and dreading the evening all week. My phone rings and I run downstairs to bring up another guest. 

It's November 7th, the date of my annual birthday party for Lise Meitner and Marie Curie. 

I have, as I've noted in the past, keep some strange holidays. I can generally be relied on to read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July and recount the Haymarket Square riots on Labor Day, sure. I think anyone who has known me for awhile knows that I have a minor Lincoln obsession and will celebrate his birthday with a Mary Todd Lincoln almond cake every February (this is the holiday I celebrate instead of Valentine's Day). These are the somewhat normal holidays I repurpose every year. 

The odder ones are, in no particular order: the day Teddy Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee and continued reading the speech he had started before accepting treatment, the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the publication dates of The Great Gatsby and The Lord of the Rings and the birthdays of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Meitner, Curie, and Jane Austen.

Of those holidays, November 7th is the most important. It's my secular Christmas. It's a mash-up of all the things I love. History, science, feminism, excellent writing, discovery. Every year I celebrate with a birthday cake and when possible, friends over for tea and birthday cake and conversation about women in science or books or writing or that article in The New York Review of Books that's been irritating me all week. 

It's one of my favorite parties. 

This year I almost canceled. 

***

I am, as I wrote previously, having some issues with OCD and anxiety again. And while they're no where near as bad as what I experienced while living in the North Country, they're bad enough that other people have noticed and insisted that I return to treatment. The amount of frustration, anger, and disappointment I feel over being unwell is indescribable. I suppose I always knew that I would live with anxiety and OCD for my entire life, but there was a not insignificant part of me who hoped that it was really a function of loneliness and the place where I was living, that once I moved back to a city I love and was surrounded by people who love me, all of my mental health issues would vanish. 

I have a slight giant tendency to be extremely hard on myself. I'm also stubborn, proud, and am used to fixing things on my own. It is, of course, what kept me from getting treated for so long (which, of course, ultimately meant that I had a bigger hole to clamber out of when I finally did). Becoming a sane, stable individual is, for some of us at least, an entire life's work. 

There's still a version of myself who is constantly telling me "It doesn't matter. If you can't make yourself happy here, you won't be happy anywhere. You're a drag on all your friends, no one is ever going to love you, and you might as well accept that you'll die old, alone, and crazy." 

That Kelly is such a bitch. She's also unbelievably loud. And convincing. 

***

The Benedictines really did a number on me. 

After seven years of schooling with them it was, I suppose, somewhat inevitable. But they didn't make me want to become a nun, and they certainly didn't keep me a Catholic. What they did pound into my head were those damn Benedictine Values: Community Living, Taking Counsel, Listening, the Dignity of Work, Hospitality, Stewardship and the rest of them that have essentially told me for my entire adult life "A job that pays you piles of money, a big house, all of the trappings of the successful adult world are not the way to live." 

The Benedictines would ask "Are you doing God's work in the world?" and despite the fact that I'm an atheist, it's still a question I ask myself, on average, three hundred times a week, even if it comes out a little differently:

"Are you living a life of deep meaning? Is this the life you want to live, because your existence is so improbable and you only get one shot at this. It better be."

That's the damndest part of dealing with mental health issues. I feel like those Benedictine nuns are looking over my shoulder tsking at how because of anxiety and depression I'm not able to be my best self. I can't be the Kelly I'm supposed to be because when I come home these days I go right to bed or sit down in front of the television so I don't have to think. They serve as a constant reminder that this is not the way you're supposed to live, Kelly. 

***

Six people drop in for the Curie/Meitner party, which is the perfect amount for my tiny apartment. We end up talking as much about books and family law as we do about women and science, but we drink six pots of mint tea and eat all of the funfetti cake (homemade funfetti, who knew?). It's a fun, quiet party, full of the kind of conversation I love most. 

Despite the week I've had and the depression I'm struggling with, despite the fact that we used literally every single plate I own, despite the headache throbbing behind my eyeballs, I'm really happy. Happier than I expected to be. 

Those nuns, I realize as I stack plates in the sink and check the oven for what feels like the seven-hundredth time, aren't tsking over my shoulder. If anything, they'd be offering me a cup of tea and asking in that wonderful women-religious way how are you doing? 

I finally give in and take something for my head, switch out the lamps, and crawl into bed.  The bitchy, anxious side of my brain immediately starts up These aren't tension headaches, it's a tumor and you're going to die in your sleep. Your cake was terrible, people just ate it because they feel sorry for you. You are never, ever going to be well. 

I think of the people who have just spent the evening with me, the conversation we had, the list of books I have to read, the suggestions for therapists I've procured. I consider the holidays I celebrate, and the fact that despite being a bit odd they hold deep meaning for me and that the friends I've made are willing to celebrate them with me. I remember my favorite bit of Marie Curie's writing:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this something must be attained. 

Anxiety, depression, and OCD are, truthfully, going to make my life extremely difficult for at least the foreseeable future. I will struggle with them to varying degrees for my entire life. While that's a pretty grim reality, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be able to live the life I want to live, the life the Benedictines taught me was important. And as the medication I've taken for my head gently tugs me towards sleep, I murmur two words that haven't slipped out of my mouth in a long time.

Amen. Alleluia.  

Waiting for Superman

Is it overwhelming to use a crane to crush a fly?

It's a good time for Superman. 

Being an adult has not been treating me well lately.

It's early on a Sunday morning, and I am up trying to redact a conversation from the night before. It's not working and I'm getting frustrated with myself. I'm a writer, damn it, this shouldn't be so difficult to do. And I should under absolutely no circumstances be allowed to carry on a conversation after 10:00pm. Ever.

Here's the truth.

I've been hopelessly cocking up all of the things that feel like grown-up life lately. I'm in the middle of a fight with both my bank and student loan companies, I have, perhaps irreparably, damaged several close friendships, there's soap scum in my bathroom tub, and I literally laughed in my date's face last night. Although, to be fair, he responded to hearing about my Higgs Boson Halloween costume with "Oh, quantum mechanics! I'm really into reiki."

This, apparently, was not a joke.

I failed the date.

Is it getting heavy? 

But then I realize, is it getting heavy?

Because I thought it was already as heavy as can be.

Less than a mile into our run I start gasping for breath. 

"We gotta walk." I manage to get out. 

It's not unusual for my running partner and I to walk a little during our runs. Depending on the say sometimes I just need a break (usually on things over five miles). Some days I'm tired or stiff. Some days I'm not feeling it. 

"Are you all right?" He's concerned. 

"Yeah. I'm just . . . I don't know. Really tired today. I don't want to be doing this. I nearly forgot to come over today." 

"It's fine. We'll just do the normal loop and when you need to walk, we'll walk." 

I'm so tired we walk nearly all of the five miles. 

Failed that run. 

Is it getting heavy? 
But then I realize, is it getting heavy?
Because I thought it was already as heavy as can be. 

I nearly forgot to vote. 

I'm slouching through the sleety, wet evening, desperately wishing I was back at home in my slippers and sweats, drinking tea and watching the final season of 30 Rock. But I'm slouching through the sleet to my polling place because I nearly forgot to vote. 

To put this into perspective, every November I watch Iron Jawed Angels. Alice Paul's quote "When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row" has hung above every desk I've owned since I was eighteen. I have not only participated in every election since I was eighteen, but I've been in the first twenty ballots cast of every election since I was eighteen. You know what ballot I was tonight?

148. 

I swear as I'm trudging back up the street to my house, tension headache forming somewhere behind my eyeballs, I can feel Alice Paul walking behind me shaking her head.

Failed the feminists.

I asked you a question.

I didn't need you to reply. 

"You need to start therapy again." 

There are two people right now who are really clued in to my mental health. The first, as always, is Kerry. The second is my running partner, as running is how I'm dealing with all of my emotions lately. When Kerry suggests I need to start seeing someone again I tell her no, I'm working the program. I'm eating right. I'm working out. I'm seeing my friends. I'm trying to put some distance between myself and work. I'll be fine. Things are just stressful at work and will settle down after the holidays. It's just falling for someone. It's just falling out with someone. It's just this time of year. It's just homesickness.  

I'll be fine. 

My running partner's first words when he walks into his house are "You need to get back into therapy." There's no hello. There's no "how was your day?" There's no "How many miles you wanna do today, Kels?" Nope. Just "You need to get back into therapy. Put your shoes on. We're going outside." While we running I indicate that I'm having tension headaches, that I'm having problems with insomnia again, that when I eat I get sick to my stomach. 

"Go. Back. To. Therapy." 

"I can't" I want to blurt out. "That means I failed." 

Tell everybody who's waiting for Superman

To try to hold on the best they can. 

The end of the month is supposed to be a big milestone for me. 

It will have been one year since I had a major OCD symptom. One year since I was unable to leave the house because I was so anxious. One year slowly rebuilding my mental health. One year clawing my way back from crippling depression. I've been looking forward to this anniversary for an entire month already. It was going to be a day I celebrated quietly, where I made tea in the morning and left the house completely carefree, not worrying about burning the place down. 

If I even notice the day when it arrives, I'll be shocked. 

He hasn't dropped them, forgot them, or anything

It's just too heavy for Superman to lift. 

Here's the truth.

I was supposed to be fixed. I was supposed to work the plan my doctor and I came up with. I was supposed to learn how to cope with stress on my own. But the truth of the matter is that despite the running and eating right and finding a new job and moving and checking everything off the damn list I'm backsliding. I'm anxious. I don't feel much aside from worry these days. The wiring in my head that I thought I had finally redone seems to have shaken loose again.

And it happened so damn fast. And I don't know what caused it. 

I can't describe how frustrating and disheartening it is to realize that even after all this damn work, after remaking my life, after finally starting to live the life that I actually want to live these illnesses can still sneak up on me. I have been so happy for the past few months, and I don't know what caused these illnesses to come back. I don't know what triggered them and apparently this time through, I don't know ho to get rid of them. And, horrifyingly, despite therapy and education, I'm still at the point where while they're  taking over it they can convince me that there's nothing wrong with you. 

I failed. 

If It Isn't Exactly Love

Here's the thing about my mother.

She looks like your classic mom. She wears cardigans with birds on them and glasses. She has a plaid apron with moose on it. If she's sitting still, she's knitting.

She also has the habit of springing embarrassing or perceptive or just plain strange conversations or questions on you at the oddest moments.

Say, for example, it's a few days before Christmas. You'll be sitting in the living room, I don't know, updating your blog about how your extroverted family stresses you out. She'll be putzing with the decorations on the Christmas tree and she'll stop and say:

"Hey, Kel?"

"Yeah, Ma?"

"Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey?"

"Uhhhhh. No."

"Why do you think people do that . . . what is it called . . . You know. That weird stuff?"

"Bondage, Mom?"

"Yes! Why do people do that? Are they sick?"

After years of questions like this, my brothers and I have all developed our own coping mechanisms. Two of us will tell her she's being inappropriate and redirect the conversation. One of us will simply learn to close her laptop, get up, and walk away.

Once, over a college break, the two of us were sitting in the living room. She was knitting, I was reading. The boys were all out trap shooting or making sausage or doings something testosterone-y. I was enjoying the rare quiet in our house. Mom was making me a new scarf because Oh, it's so darn cold in Minnesota. I looked up from the novel I was reading and caught her eye.

"Hey, Kel?"

My wariness increased tenfold, instantly.

"Yeah, Ma?"

"You know your father and I have been married over 25 years, right?"

"Yes. I threw your 25th wedding anniversary party, Ma. I know."

"You know," She said, looking over her knitting at me. "Your father has changed an awful lot over that time."

Huh?

Even for her, this is unusual. My mother has never talked to me about her relationship with my father. Never. Not once in the twenty-one years I've been alive has she said "Your Dad is driving me crazy." Or "I love [whatever] about your father." We're Upper Midwestern. We don't write in dream journals. We don't see therapists. We don't talk about our feelings. We certainly do not discuss our long-term monogamous relationships with our children.

I get ready to leave. I love my folks, but I absolutely do not want to be the sounding board for whatever's coming next.

She sets her knitting down and I'm already getting out of my chair.

"You know. He's a completely different person than he used to be." She smiles. "And I love it. I get to fall in love with him all over again." She picks up her knitting and leaves me so stunned I have to sit back down.

***

"Were you planning on making a move?" I'm equal parts amused and irritated. "Because if not, I've still got to get work in the morning."

The guy next to me starts laughing. "You're so direct." He's staying over because the weather outside has taken a turn for the worst and it is legitimately dangerous to be out driving, even for the most stalwart Minnesotan. Things have been confusing between us for months now, and now despite the serendipitous confluence of cute girl, wine, Bon Iver on the radio, and snowstorm, instead of going for it, he's been inching closer to me for the past hour. 

Being a real Can-Do kind of a girl, I start to get progressively more direct. 

In an hour, he'll be asleep. I'll be restless.

***

Here's the thing about my father. 

He shows that he loves you by changing the oil in your car while you're still asleep on a Saturday morning. He will give you hubcaps for Christmas because he thinks it's funny and practical. 

He also loves my mother so much that it astounds me. 

To be perfectly clear, I adore my mom. I adore my whole family. Dad astounds me because I actually did not know it was possible to love someone the way he and my mom love one another. 

I can't remember a Valentine's Day, birthday, or anniversary where Dad didn't bring home flowers for her. He completely redoes her gardens for her every few years (this involves a staggering amount of work. My mother has lovely gardens). Years ago, when she started rock climbing he mounted a board for her in the basement so she could work on her upper body strength. He makes her soup when she's sick, breakfast on Mother's Day, takes her out to hear jazz on her birthday. He hates being away from her for more than a few days.

"So we'll be home over Thanksgiving."

My younger brother and I are discussing Thanksgiving plans. Normally, he and I spend Thanksgiving with our father, butchering deer (Full disclosure: I do very little of this.) and listening as Patrick Stewart narrates an imaginary documentary about dragons (Full disclosure: This actually happened last year and remains one of the best moment in my relationship with my younger brother). I'm a little taken aback, mainly because my Thanksgiving plans recently changed, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend in the woods.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, you know how Dad gets."

Last year he decided to spend an extra few days at deer camp. The entire three days I was there he said, on average six hundred times a day, "I miss your mom. I wish your mom was here." When she called, he raced for the phone like a teenage girl. 

"Hi honey, I love you."

***

"You can't stay."

I've barely taken my shoes off. "Excuse me?" He's finally told me where he lives and it's made me feel . . . better about our relationship.

He's in the kitchen opening the wine I've brought over. "I don't live here alone. You can't stay."

"I thought you said it was a one-bedroom." 

He looks at me and just lets my comment hang. 

It takes me awhile to understand what he means. I'm still young, afterall, and if this isn't exactly love I certainly didn't expect it to be this. When things do connect I walk though the house flicking on lights and peering into closets and medicine cabinets and dresser drawers. When I come back out I grab my wine glass, drain it, put my shoes back on, and walk out. As I'm opening the door he grabs my arm "This isn't a big deal." 

I leave. 

We'll see one another again.

***

Here's the thing about me. 

I like to be alone. I've always liked to be alone. As a kid, my Barbies had careers, fancy cars, swimming pools, tons of friends. You know what they never had? A Ken doll. They never had boyfriends or husbands. I played dress-up-as-priest-and-distribute-Communion, not dress-up-like-a-bride-and-pretend-to-get-married. As an adult, I like to stay in on Friday nights and read. I have solo dance parties to Prince in the kitchen. I am at my happiest when, after a few nights of seeing friends I come home to a clean, quiet house and spend the night doing exactly what I want to do. 

I also want to be with someone.

God, I do. I want it badly. And I hate it. I hate that my life right now isn't enough, that there seems to be something missing and that what's missing is a goddamn romantic relationship. I want to stop wanting it so badly. I'm tired of feeling like a supporting character in When Harry Met Sally.

I can't.

I can't. I don't know how. I want someone to take me out dancing to jazz on my birthday. I want to make Mimi soup for someone when he's sick. I want a chance to wear my couples Halloween costume idea with someone who will genuinely think it's awesome (A black hole and spaghettification! Come on. That's pretty great). I want to fall in love with someone again and again over the course of thirty years. I want someone to answer the phone:

"Hi honey, I love you."

Haunted

"And then what?"

Michelle and I are squished into a booth in a tiny Lebanese deli and I'm updating her on recent events.

"I had a panic attack."

She puts her head in her hands. "Of course you did. How bad was it? Was it one where you needed one of the bags? What was going on?" 

"Mostly kissing. And it wasn't that bad. I didn't need a bag. I just needed to . . . I don't know. Slow things down. Think rationally for a second."

"Oh, honey. The last thing you needed to do was keep thinking." She pauses. "I love you, but you're just a mess."

"But a good mess right? You know, like how I strive to be sort of charmingly crazy rather than don't-stir-that-pot-of-crazy crazy? Can I be a funny, smart mess? A mess who's also a good writer and a fantastic baker and pretty generally has her life together? Maybe a mess that you wouldn't be, I don't know, completely disappointed you spent the night with when you woke up the next morning?"

"You want stuffed grape leaves?"

"I hate you."

***

Here, in no particular order are some things that scare me.

Confined spaces. Heights. Being touched by strangers. That whatever guy I'm with is secretly a serial killer and I'm about to done in in some horrible, gruesome, Dexter-esque way. Anything jumping out at me. The Redneck Pain Family from Cabin in the Woods. The monsters from Hush. Basically anything Joss Whedon has ever created with the intention of scaring the shit out of you. The Exorcist. The Blair Witch Project. Walking down empty streets alone in the middle of the night. Anyone chasing me in any context ever (which is amplified when they have a chainsaw). 

That seems like enough for now.

***

I have two really bad moments in the haunted house. 

Haunted houses are emphatically not my thing. I like a good scare, yeah, absolutely. But I have a terrible startle reflex, so jumpy things and I are not the best match. I don't watch movies where things pop out of nowhere and I generally avoid haunted houses this time of year. 

But it's a dear friend's bachlorette party and I'm trying to be a good sport, so I agree "Yes, a haunted house sounds like fun!" all the time thinking "Oh my God. The last time I was at a haunted house I was twelve years old, got separated from my family, and was so scared I peed my pants. This is going to be bad."

I drink almost nothing all day and go to the bathroom four times before we get in line. 

Things start to fall apart when we board the hayride to take us out to the haunted house and are informed "Our monsters will touch you. You may not touch them."

Oh shit. 

We make it through the hayride with me squeezing myself into the middle of the wagon and pulling my hat down over my eyes and generally avoiding everything going on around me, which is a cacophony of bangs and screams and random people in costumes jumping on the wagon and ohmygodthere'saredneckpainfamilymemberstrokingmyback. 

Despite the fact that I can't stop screaming, this is not one of the bad moments. 

Jess is good enough to walk next to me and hold my hand over the next forty minutes. She takes the brunt of the attention, but there are still people jumping out and touching me every three to three and a half minutes.

Eventually, we're trying to get into some dark building and someone walks up behind me and starts stroking the back of my neck. 

As we were walking in, I had given myself a pep talk. "None of this," I told myself "is real. You are in control of how you react to this. These are human beings and if they see you start crying or you ask them to stop touching you they'll have some compassion."

False. 

The guy stroking the back of my neck just won't quit, not even after I shout "Stop fucking touching me!" 

So I throw an elbow. 

This guy is also apparently, a member of the Redneck Pain Family, because this just makes him lean in closer and start whispering in my ear, something typically reserved for people who spend the night. I'm freaking and Jess yanks me forward. 

***

"So," Michelle asks, after the grape leaves have arrived. "Why the panic attack?"

I play with my food for a little while and don't answer.

"Oh, Kels. Was it the serial killer thing again? You need to talk to someone about that."

"I do not need to talk to someone about it! We grew up in Milwaukee while Jeffery Dahmer was still at large. Our brains hadn't finished forming yet, I think it's perfectly reasonable that it scares the shit out of me."

"I've told you this before. You're not" she pauses here for emphasis, as if I don't already know what she's about to say "a gay man. As such, that particular fixation is not reasonable."

"It's not just Dahmer! It's the whole thing, the whole serial killer thing." Her eyebrows go up. "Shut up. I was reasonably confident he was not a serial killer and that was not what was making me panicky." 

"So what was it?"

I give her the Cliff Notes version, the same thing I've told two other people, one of whom was my therapist. I tell her and despite the fact that she's been my closest friend for fifteen years, it's really, really hard. She, not one for physical affection, gives me the last grape leaf. "Oh, honey." 

***

I do all right for the remainder of the haunted house, holding it together through a room where the walls are soft, black, weighted, and literally pressing in on you and through strobe-lit corn mazes and on and on. It's the last maze, the one with the black walls, black hallways, and no lights where I dig in my heels and say "No. No. Nononononononono. I can't do this." I get tugged forward and the next thing I know I'm in a long, dark, hallway. 

The are two men in masks running straight at me. From opposite directions. With chainsaws. 

There are moments in your life where the rational side of your brain checks out. Where the calm, reasonable, thoughtful person you've always thought you were goes out for lunch without you. Say, when someone you love calls you and says "I never want to see you again." Or when you're kissing some devastatingly cute guy and you flash back to the last time you were kissing some good-looking guy and how that ended. 

Or when there are two people representing one of your worst, most archetypal fears chasing you down a dark hallway lit only with strobe lights. 

Jess can feel actually feel my fight-or-flight-response kick in. When we finally got out of this damn place she said "I knew you were going to bolt, that you weren't thinking clearly, and that you were going to get lost. Alone. That would have ended badly." She screams at me "Pull it together, Prosen!" 

I close my eyes. We run.

***

Michelle and I pay our bill and step outside the restaurant. In the open air of the street she finally asks.

"Panic attacks . . ."

"Attack. I only had one. And it was short."

"Panic attack aside, how was it?"

I just smile.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your poker face sucks. I knew the second you stepped out of your car." 

I hug her. "I knew you knew. That's why I told you the rest of it." I pause "I'm just afraid . . ."

"Nope." She shushes me. "Don't even go there." Then she hugs me back. "Way to . . . you know . . . face your fears. We'll get you to watch The Exorcist yet."

"Actually," I brighten up a little. "I'm going to a haunted house at the end of the month."

"I'm so, so sorry for whoever is going with you."

I jingle my keys as I'm getting into my car. "I don't know. I've got a good feeling about this one."

Snob

“I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body.”

This comment is met by laughter so loud the other people in the bar turn to look at our table. I reflect that it would have been more successful were we not in my favorite bar—a slightly higher end scotch and beer place—a place that blows my budget to hell if I’m not careful.

I take another sip of my drink and roll my eyes. I was entirely serious—we’ve been talking about books and music with the intensity that comes with unwinding at the end of a long week. I’ve just finished shredding a book a few of us have recently read featuring vampires and werewolves and witches. It’s a hot mess of a book, and not even a fun hot mess. It’s in response to this that I get called a snob and retort in kind. Honestly, I’m just happy to be out among friends talking about music and books and art. It’s been a long time, and I’m nearing the shiny-eyed intensity that comes when I’m the exact right amount of stimulated.

The waitress takes advantage of the lull in laughter and talk to come around ask if we want another drink. One of my quicker friends beats me to my order.

“Yes, Kel here will have your least snobbish scotch.”

I give him a hand gesture indicating he’ll get his comeuppance and the table breaks up again.

***

“That’s one of my favorite songs!”

I’m walking down the street with a guy who will break my heart more than once in the coming months. But we don’t know that yet. For now, we’re walking down the street in that lovely, early stage of going top-over-teakettle for someone. When you keep discovering things you have in common and ohyeahmetoo-ing and grinning like a fool and thinking ohmygodthisistheone.

I mean, everyone does that, right?

Our current conversation has touched on everything from a shared interest in trying foie gras (I know a place in the city we should try!) to what we’re reading (Me: Les Mis. Him: Moby Dick.) to our shared love for Bon Iver (to this day hearing that song in the fall makes me really nostalgic for this exact moment in our lives.)

We’re dawdling as we approach my house, slowing our steps and lingering over conversation. Eventually we run out of sidewalk and get to the front door. He puts his hand on my elbow and I turn away from the door, where my hands have been shaking so badly I can’t get the key in the lock. He smiles at me and I honest-to-god almost fall down. Skinny guys with nice smiles always completely undo me and this guy is no exception.

Squeezing my arm he says “I’ve never met a girl with such good taste.” And while he doesn’t kiss me, the extra bit of air he’s just given my already over-inflated ego almost makes up for it.

***

I hate Anna Karenina.

There. I said it. I fucking hate that book. I hate it the way I hate my boobs. I hate it the way I hate listening to voicemail. I hate it so intensely that just seeing it on my bookshelf makes me nearly apoplectic with rage.

Overreaction to a book? Yeah, probably.

I tried three times to read Anna Karenina. Three damn times, and each time took me weeks. The first two times I managed to make it two thirds of the way through the book. You know, the spot where (spoilers!) the titular character throws herself under a train? Also known as the part where the book should just oh my god end already? The third time I slogged through the remaining two hundred pages because, damn it, this was a classic and it was a book I was supposed to enjoy and I wasn’t going to quit.

When I finally finished I was just disgusted with the amount of time I had wasted on the book.

Then I sat down and read the Millennium Trilogy in a weekend.

I lied when I said I finished it because it was a classic.

I finished Anna Karenina for foie gras boy. He loved it.

Shoulda taken that as a sign.

***

I am horrified to remember some of the conversations that I had with this guy. Or by some of the dates we went on. I once spent eighty dollars (Eighty dollars! Also known as a student loan payment, two tanks of gas, or my grocery budget for two weeks) on a picnic for the two of us. A picnic we ate overlooking the Mississippi River (Me: heels, dress. Him: button-down, jacket.) prior to a orchestra concert and definitely prior to him inflicting Bartok on me for several hours while he expounded on music and I fought off yawns.

I’m also deeply embarrassed by a lie I told him. I had picked up the phone (he was traveling) and when he heard my heavy breathing he asked what I was up to and why I sounded so out of breath.

“Uhhhhh.” I stalled. I’ve never been terribly good at dissembling. “Lugging groceries up the stairs,” I said, kicking open the apartment door and dropping a desktop computer on a kitchen table. “I’m making a wild mushroom and Stilton galette this weekend. Then I’ll hang out reading Les Mis.” I pause. "Yes. I know you love it. Yes. I know it's a beautiful book. Yes. That's why I'm reading it."

People looked up from their various cables and pulled headphones off. I made a sushing gesture and hooked up my monitor. There’s just no way I would tell him I was LAN-ing for the weekend. That I would spend the entire weekend drinking coffee, catching a few hours sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, and playing my way through Diablo I&II. When he told me to have a good weekend, we’d go out for wine on Sunday I said “Yup, uh-huh. Sounds good” and quickly hung up the phone, barely trusting the men and women in the room to keep it together. As soon as they saw my phone is off the shouting started.

“Why did we order pizza?!”
“Clark, watch out, I think Lois is starting to see through you!”
“You’re embarrassed to be seen with us!”
“-20 to passive awesomeness, Kels!”

When they’d finished we put our headphones on. As we logged on, it took a few seconds to realize that characters are showing up with names like Marius and Javert.

“Very funny, guys.”

The entire room broke up again.

***

“You know what? Bartok JUST SOUNDS LIKE NOISE, I like Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready, sometimes I’d skip the opera with you so I could go game, and by the way, Les Mis is the single most tedious book I’ve ever encountered. It's nearly as tedious as 70% of our conversations.”

The best-worst conversation of my life ends with me shouting that into a phone and promptly hanging up. I’ve just been told by foie gras that he loves someone else. That he never loved me. That my taste is ohsomuchmore pedestrian than he thought. Also that I'm crazy and unstable. And that he never loved me, did he mention that?

I take Les Mis to the used bookstore and exchange it for Game of Thrones.

***

“What I mean when I say I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body” I say, as we walk to the car, (We had that second round, and a third, and are now on our way out for cheap pizza before we go spend the night playing Cards Against Humanity.) “is that I still like some nice things, scotch and good food, mainly. But I still like cheap pizza and I’ll happily drink a Miller Lite. What I mean is that I don’t care what other people like to read even if it’s stupid vampire fiction. I don’t think that you should read or eat or drink things just to make other people happy.”

The guy who ordered the least snobbish scotch for me reaches for my arm and squeezes it. “Kels, we know.” His eyes sparkle as he leans in and despite the fact that he’s gay, my knees still go a little weak. He says:

“And it’s fine that you never finished Les Mis. The musical is better anyway.”

And despite the fact that he was never going to kiss me, the boost he's given to my self-worth is just as good.