V-Day

There's a bookstore about a mile and a half from my house that I love. Every pay day Friday since I've moved in, I've made a habit of stopping in and browsing, occasionally picking up the odd book of poems or novel for their book club that I never seem to be able to make it to.

It's a great bookstore. It's locally owned, has a fantastic selection, and they don't seem to mind if you buy something and then curl up on the couch. The staff makes excellent suggestions and write reviews of books that are useful and funny.

I haven't been there in two months. 

The reason I stopped going is because one of the clerks is, well, astoundingly good-looking. Handsome men and I already have a tumultuous relationship (I can't look them in the face and my stutter comes out) but this guy is not only painfully good looking (he has David Tennant as Doctor Who hair!) but he writes the best reviews in the shop (they're funny, pithy, smart) and ohmygod likes amazing books. 

As such, I am utterly incapable of having a normal interaction with him. Once I spit my gum out while talking to him about the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've walked smack into him when he's taking me to find a book. I stammer and blush like a fourteen year old girl trying to ask a boy to homecoming. When he followed me on Twitter, I had to go hide in the storage closet at work to calm down. 

Anyway, about two months ago, I was in the shop doing my normal Friday browsing and I decided to pick up Eleanor & Park. I needed a quick read and it's the book for book club in April. As I was walking up to the counter, past the table of biographies this guy asked me a question out of the blue about the book and I was so startled and nervous that I walked right smack into said biography table, upsetting it (and me) and spilling nearly half the books on the floor. Guiltily, I offered to help clean up, and when he (graciously) said thanks but no (probably envisioning the havoc I would continue to wreak in the store) I turned scarlet, turned tail, paid for the book, and fled. 

***

I spent last Valentine's Day explaining, in tedious, exhausting detail, why a friend of mine was an idiot. 

In my defense, he was being a little bit of a curmudgeon. I had been telling him about a close friend's recent break-up (two days before) and how it had screwed up my Valentine's Day plans (which, let's face it, were to get drunk with a couple lesbians in the city's brewpub) and his response was, well, not cold, but he didn't get why someone might be so broken up over breaking up. 

Oh man. He completely underestimated that I a) am an emotional person b) have a pathological need to be both the smartest person in the room and c) am an narcissist who will never use one word where I can use 1,000 (actual count in the email).

Seriously. He's lucky he didn't get a footnotes.  

I am, retroactively, more than a little embarrassed. 

I still think I was right. 

***

I've gone through a lot of versions of Valentine's Days.

Let's clear the air first. I am 0/29 on being with someone on Valentine's Day. Zero for twenty-nine. That's pretty fucking grim. Never once in the whole series of tempestuous relationships I've had have I ever spent a Valentine's Day with someone. Not. Once. As such, I've had twenty-nine years to figure out the best approach to the holiday. I've tried ignoring it. I've tried staying in and ordering takeaway. I've tried bourbon and Patsy Cline, bourbon and Miles Davis, bourbon and bourbon. I've tried dinner out with friends, I've tried picking other malcontents up at the bar. I've tried workshops at the local feminist sex shop. I've gone to and performed in The Vagina Monologues. 

I've tried everything to get through it, get over it. 

***

"I'm wigging out about Valentine's Day."

My running partner and I are out for a long walk and because of that special bond that forms with someone who has seen you through, well, some gruesome side effects of being an endurance athlete, I confide in him. 

"Oh, Christ. You're turning into one of those people." 

"Oh, shut up." 

He laughs and we change the subject to body image and thigh gap and The Biggest Loser and I'm forced to tell him that he was right about my cracked out conception of my body. He teases me, with less bite than usual and when we get back to my car, I spend the moments waiting for it to warm up in quiet gratitude for our friendship and the ways in which it's grown over the past years. 

***

"Kel, I don't know how you stay so positive about dating." 

The comment comes as something of a surprise and from one of my closest friends. She has the kind of adult life I envy and that seems impossible for someone who isn't even thirty. She's respected at work and good at her job, she has a husband, a house that (at times) feels more like home than my apartment, and a comic book collection in the basement. 

I start laughing. "Really? I always feel like I'm being really negative." 

She waits for a moment. "No. I mean, I think you're being funny and sort of lighthearted about it, but you manage to be so upbeat. I don't know how you do it. It seems so hard." 

I am confounded by her comment. I feel like out of all the aspects of my life, the one about which I am most consistently negative is my dating life. But it's one of those cases where I'm willing to take the compliment so I just say "thanks." 

***

I had really thought that by twenty-nine I would have a better grasp on my personality than I do. 

I'm probably going to be the only person who was amazed by what I am about to say, but when I realized it, I didn't know what to do with myself. 

I have a Pollyanna streak a country mile long. 

A colleague pointed it out to me a few weeks ago. I have a tendency to, even in the face of great adversity, be relentlessly upbeat. Even if the anxiety-fueled part of my brain (which is most of it) is churning away on the number of worst case scenarios, I am outwardly pervasively (perversely?) cheerful. 

Whether it's using humor to deflect my actual feelings or if it's simply my normal personality, I have no idea, but I am apparently the worst person to have around if you want to bitch about what's going on in your life without someone telling you about all the things you have to be grateful for or the myriad ways in which it could be worse, so just buck up already. 

***

I've been listening to Billie Holiday all week. 

I've been turning Spotify onto a private session, pulling up Billie, and putting One for My Baby, One More for the Road on repeat for hours. 

Man, no one can sing about heartbreak the way Billie sings about heartbreak. 

As the week went on, I made plans to spend Friday night in with a bottle of bourbon, Billie Holiday, and Wuthering Heights. That should give you a pretty good indication as to how I feel about love these days. 

Except it doesn't.

For all the Billie Holiday and novels about doomed love and jealousy, I'll wear red to work on Friday. I'll pull out my heart-shaped cookie cutters and make Jammie Dodgers to mail out to people on Monday morning (I've never been great with timing). I'll watch Pride & Prejudice while baking tomorrow night. 

I've spent a lot of years trying to be grouchy about love because it seemed like the thing to do on Valentine's day.  As a result, I've been grouchy on a lot of Valentine's Days. 

But the issue isn't the singleness. It isn't that I'm awkward around men and knock over or run into things. The issue is that, well, I love love. 

It turns out that the Pollyanna streak in me is fucking irrepressible.Put another way, my default is to such an intense level of cheerfulness and everything always works out for the best that even when I think I'm being negative, harsh, or angry I'm still radiating positivity.

This year it's changing how I feel about Valentine's Day. Or rather, it's making me less wigged out. The walk with my running partner shook up the Etch-a-Sketch. Instead of getting angrysad about the fact that I'm going 0/29 this Valentine's Day all I can think about is the people who brought me soup and crackers last week. When my best friend and I have sing-alongs to Dashboard Confessionals at the top of our lunch. How Kerry and I video chatted for hours on Monday about books and science. That my family is alive and healthy and growing and (Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, here comes the Pollyanna streak) there are so many people in my life right now that I consider family. The number of people who love me, and love me deeply, is more than I deserve.  

And, yes, I want the Eros kind of love (you had to know I'd bring back the Greek at some point). I want all of the foolish, ridiculous, top-over-teakettle stuff (the mooning about, the can't-keep-your-hands-off-of-one-another, the late night giggly phone conversations, the exchange of books and movies and music). I want it so badly that sometimes I feel like I might shrivel up and die without it. But for as much as I want it, I'm no longer willing to let it run roughshod over an entire day. 

So, this Valentine's Day, no Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith. No four-page-long emails to men telling them they're idiots (whatever idiotic assertions they might make). There may be bourbon, but instead of Wuthering Heights it just may be accompanied by something I've picked up from the bookstore on my way home. 

Looks like I finally did have that moment of Public Radio insight. 

Dear Chicago

I am hiding in the bathroom at my own party.

One of the nicest, most understanding things someone has ever done for me was a few years ago at a Memorial Day party. My friend Kristin came up to me and pulled me into her bedroom.

"I know," she said "you have a tendency to get overwhelmed at parties and you just leave. I want you to know that if you need to come be by yourself for awhile, you can come sit in here and no one will bother you. You don't have to leave."

It was an incredibly kind gesture, one that indicated how well she knew me and how much she loved me.

Anyway, that was a few years ago. Tonight, Saturday, I'm in the bathroom at my own party, crying so hard I'm running the water so no one hears me.

***

I keep looking at apartments in Chicago. 

My browser window, at any given point in time, has between ten and fifteen tabs open to different apartment hunting websites in different cities. The majority are Chicago and Seattle, with a few token ones open for D.C., San Francisco, and Boston. 

Call it winter madness or a case of the doldrums or whatever the hell you want, but I can't stop thinking about . . . being somewhere else. 

***

My love life is a disaster. 

I'm serious. FEMA needs to be called. Religious people bearing bowls of soup need to stage an intervention. Someone should have a benefit concert because this thing is a certifiable calamity. 

The winter months have always been a little tricky for me. My past relationships have all started November-ish and run through the spring, so it's hard not to feel like I should be with someone. The weather is nasty and the thought of having someone to snuggle up and read with is, well, appealing. I am freezing from the months of October until May, so another body in the house would be deeply appreciated. 

On top of that, nearly everyone I love has gotten married in the winter. And in the face of my parents' thirty-second (thirty-second!) wedding anniversary and the prospect of going to another wedding alone I made some extremely regrettable choices (the kind that make you want to take a bath in lye). 

It's a tricky thing, wanting someone to want you. It almost never shakes out the way you hope.

***

It's the prospect of buying bookshelves that has me looking at apartments in other cities. 

A friend and I make a special trip to Ikea to look at getting me some big girl bookshelves, enough that all of my books will actually fit in my apartment. Despite the fact that I've put the money aside to purchase said bookshelves, when we get there I dither over exactly what I want (as if I didn't already research them online and come in with a shortlist and an estimated number for the square-footage I'd need to comfortably house all my books.) 

"None of these will fit in my car. But I think I've made a decision. Maybe we can come back another time?" 

I have schlepped my goddamn library across the state of Minnesota more times than I can count. Do you have any idea how much space several hundred books take up? A lot. They take up a lot of space. And I've never had enough bookshelves to house all of them. 

Buying shelves just seems like such a commitment. It's a statement that I am going to be in this apartment in this city, in this life for long enough to settle in to something. 

***

I'm in the bathroom crying because of a conversation I overheard.

I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up. Some of the party stragglers were in the other room chatting. Because my apartment is the size of a matchbox, I could hear the conversation they were having. It was about work and what projects they have going on (these are my artistic friends) and I overheared one say to the other "Yeah, I stopped doing pro-bono work, but Kel seriously needed help with this work project, and you know, she's just fantastic so I said yes." He paused "I hope that girl gets everything she wants out of life." 

I didn't hear the rest of the conversation because I'm hiding in the bathroom crying fit to beat the band. 

***

I cut and run. 

I've done it my entire life and in every aspect of my life. Work gets tough? Find a new job. Don't like a city? Move on. Relationship getting to be more work than you anticipated? Dump the guy and move on. 

I talk and write so much about my desire to unhook my safety line of self and fallfallfall for someone. But the truth is that I always have a backup line. There's always a way for me to back out when things start to last for a minute longer than I want them. It's so much easier to get wigged out by commitment and have an extremely regrettable one night stand, or to fall for people I know won't work or I won't like in two month's time than think about why I don't have the kind of relationship where we're celebrating an anniversary. It's. Just. Easier. 

I am living a life I love. I am actually surrounded by people who would do anything for me, who want to see me successful and healthy and happy and who are willing to make actual honest-to-God sacrifices to make those things happen for me. And my response is to think about moving somewhere else. 

That realization hits me with all of the force of a cast-iron skillet to the face on Saturday night, when I overhear the conversation taking place in my living room. That kind of pathological fear of commitment isn't living. It's just suicide by tiny, tiny increments. 

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. 

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."

Scars

I have a tendency toward keloid scars. Keloids are, for those of you uninitiated into the realm of gross-but-non-lethal-things-that-can-go-wrong-with-the-human-body, enthusiastic scar tissue (Of course I'd end up with enthusiastic scar tissue. Jesus.). Keloids are scars that don't know when they're supposed to stop growing. As a result the scar tissue keeps growing past the point of the original injury.

It sounds very sci-fi doesn't it?

But like I said, non-lethal. But non-lethal doesn't necessarily mean that they're not painful. They itch, especially after showers. They're ugly and they're deeply embarrassing and I have three of them and I hate them with all of the intensity of a supernova.

Two of them are visible. One, on the top of my right breast, is from some small childhood injury. It's the one that makes me most self-conscious because it's not just visible, it's incredibly visible (Thanks, giant rack, no real way to draw attention away from the red lump on the top of you when you're calling so much attention to yourself). The second is on my left knee and is the result of a cycling accident a few years ago. That one I mind a little bit less because it's easily covered by tights, long(er) skirts, or crossing my legs. The third one, on the side of my right breast is, thankfully, always covered. That one comes from one of those particularly scary ohshiti'manadultandineedtofigurethissituationout moments.

I don't like when people ask about them (because people always do) not because of any particularly traumatic experience surrounding them, but because I hate being reminded of these small imperfections. I don't like to acknowledge them, to say Yes, these are a part of my past. I'd prefer to gloss over them, pretend they don't exist. 

While in graduate school, I spent several thousand dollars that I did not have for steroid injections into the scars in the hope that they would flatten out and fade.

It didn't seem to work. 

***

"Yeah, you got very huggy last night."

Michelle and I are out to breakfast the day after my birthday party. I'm a little rough around the edges, feeling like I should be wearing my sunglasses indoors and wishing to the gods that I could take all of the fucking silverware away from the child the next table over so maybe he'll just keep shrieking instead of shrieking and banging on the table with everything he can reach.

"What do you mean very huggy? I'm almost always flying in someone else's Soviet Airspace."

The kid at the next table over has now gotten out of his seat and is running around the table shouting "Pow! Pow! Pow!" I'm looking for the waiter. It feels like 200 years since we ordered coffee and if I don't get my biscuits and gravy (pepper gravy being well known for its healing properties) I may literally die. My organs will just give up the ghost.

"Yeah, it was worse than normal."

"Oh Christ."

The kid trips and starts screaming. I put my head on the table.

"Wake me up when the coffee gets here. Or I die."

"Sounds good."

***

 I've been weird about physical intimacy lately. 

Once again, I am emphatically not talking about sex. I'm talking about the back rubs, the hugs, the sitting-super-close-to-people-on-the-couch, the sleeping next to people intimacy that I love(d). I've been like this since . . .June? I can't figure out what the hell is going on with me. It's unsettling. And it's not that I don't want to be as close as I've always been with people, it's just that something's holding me back. 

I've been weird lately.

***

I'm on a dating time-out. 

It's been probably a month since I've gone out with Blah. We went to a sports bar to watch a baseball game sometime in . . . August? Afterward I pulled the fade-away, something I hate doing, but I just couldn't muster the emotional energy that conversation would have taken.  

I'm trying to figure out when and how you tell a guy that you're seeing "Oh, hey, so a year ago I had a nervous breakdown. I spent some time under a psychiatrist's care for OCD, anxiety, and depression. Sometimes I still have flare-ups, but for the most part I think I'm waaaaaaaaaaaay saner than I used to be. Who's your favorite Firefly character?" 

I haven't been playing well with others lately, and it seemed like an appropriate moment to put myself on a time out and figure out what I want and who I want and how the hell I'm going to drop what feels like an atom bomb on some poor unsuspecting schmuck. 

***

I want to start a relationship a month and a half to two months in. 

I want to skip all of the stupid, unfun getting to know you parts. The career summary without talking about the parts that interest either of us. The sibling listing. The "where did you grow up?" 

I want to fast-forward t the part where seeing their name pop up on your mobile makes you dizzy. The part where you gross out all of your friends with the dopey look on your face. The part where you know one another well enough to plan dates that are actually interesting and fun and engaging. The part where you go fifteen rounds over something you're both passionate about and then take forty-five minutes to say goodnight while you're parked in fifteen minute parking. The part where you can't keep your hands off of one another. 

I want to start a relationship there. 

***

During one of my rare moments of honesty with myself, I admit that my desire to go on a dating time-out and my lack of interest in physical intimacy are part and parcel of my unwillingness to let other people see my scars and my desire to start a relationship partway in.

I am petrified of getting hurt.

The idea of any kind of vulnerability--physical, emotional, whatever--is scary enough that I'd rather just sit it out. I'm ridiculously, deliriously happy with my life right now, and letting someone else in is just going to fuck it all up. Or rather, it feels like it's just going to fuck it all up. I know. I know. The right person won't care about your stupid scar tissue. Maybe they won't notice. And you're not as crazy as you used to be, and hell everyone's a little crazy anyway, you'll probably be one of the more normal girls he's dated.

Trust me. I know. I did go through therapy. I can do the pep talk.

But opening up means acknowledging the scars, letting someone see them, saying "Hey, I've gotta tell you something about the person I used to be." Instead it's just so much easier to keep injecting the steroids and hoping this time will smooth everything out.

Though, that doesn't seem to be working. 

Settle Down

I've gotta be one of the few people in the world whose closest friends gives her advice based on early 19th century literature.

I've sent one of my two best friends a loooooooong, feelings-heavy email. The length and email content are not unusual for us. She's one of the few people I confide in on a regular basis. She'd be delighted and horrified to know that I think of her as my Mother Confessor. Oh well. One of the best things about our relationship is that she's always let me communicate the things that are hard for me to talk about through text, and I'll always be grateful to her for it.

I feel like an asshole.

That's the rising action and the denouement. I feel like, and am, an asshole.

The bit in the middle is the complicated bit (isn't it always). It's the part of the email I rewrite seven times trying to find a better way to say that I feel blah about Blah.

The fact that my short name for a guy that I've been out with a few times, a guy who is genuinely interested in me, who returns my phone calls and texts with surprising promptness, who has a good, steady job, who owns his own house (in a part of the city I love). and pays all his bills ahead of time, Blah, concerns me.

It's--security, stability, niceness--what I'm supposed to want, right?

The email becomes less of an email and more of a journal entry on why dating Blah feels like settling. He is confused by the motion I make that means my heart is exploding. Like, actually doesn't understand the emotional intensity that I'm trying to signify. When I recite (Recite, people, there's no book involved) one of my favorite poems, for him he looks at me blankly and says "Oh, you like poetry?" He has asked me more than once to describe what I mean when I say seeing jazz live switches me on and makes my head buzz. When we go out we talk about work and baseball, sometimes about American History and I just feel . . .

blah.

***

I settle. 

My therapist knew it. My friends all know it. My mother regularly reminds me of it. 

It's easy to defend, especially as a woman. We get so many messages about how holding out for the exact right guy is going to leave us old, embittered spinsters. How there's no such thing as Prince Charming (as if the women who espouse settling never figured out Self-Rescuing Princess). How no one will ever be perfect and ohmygodyourjunkisgoingbad and you might as well just cut a few of those dealbreakers off of your list.

Do guys feel the same pressure?

I settle.

I regularly punch in a weight class that's justalittle beneath me. I date men who can't keep up with me intellectually, or who don't find arguing about Art and Fiction and Whether or Not Women Self-Select Out of Scientific Careers to be a turn-on. I date men who would rather meet me at Brothers after I've spent the night at the Artists' Quarter and who aren't curious or engaged in anything beyond work-family-home-sports. 

Look, I know how this sounds. Unless someone can finish the Sunday New York Times crossword in ten minutes or fewer I'm going to kick them out of bed. I am the worst person in the world because if you can't appreciate the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Concertmaster's solos on Mozart's Serenades I'm going to like you justalittlebit less. 

I know. Pretentious to the Nth degree. 

Go to hell. 

Most of the time the men I'm dating meet none of these criteria. None. And most of the time I end up miserable and hurt and disgusted with myself. But it's just so much easier to settle. It's easier to tell myself "Oh, these things aren't actually important. I don't actually need to be stimulated by someone's mind or passions or what moves them. I can handle football and happy hours and talking incessantly about cars." 

It's so much easier to settle, to drop a weight class than it is to try for the guys I actually want to date. I'm terrified that the men I want to be with--the brainiacs with weird passions, the Picard-types, the types of guys who can explain quantum mechanics or game theory to me--will be settling by dating me. 

I don't want to be the person someone settles for. 

***

The email that I get back from my confessor regarding Blah is characteristically sweet and funny. It's nice to have surrounded myself with loving, interesting people who genuinely care about me. 

The advice I get is based, on all things, Gone with the Wind. "Don't settle. Don't even think about settling. You will not be happy. The other person will not be happy. This is what I learned from Gone with the Wind. Nothing else needs to be said about that."

She's right, of course. I've got to break it off with Blah. The truth is that when we're together I find myself trying to switch off, trying to settle down because he finds my constant exuberance and enthusiasm odd. (And not charmingly odd, which seems to be the best I can hope for.) The problem, of course, is that once I'm switched on--about art or jazz or the book I'm reading or the food I've just made--it's really hard for me to switch it back off. 

And I don't want to switch it back off. 

The way, of course, to be able to live the kind of switched-on craziness that I crave is to stop settling. I've got to stop worrying that my beloved brainiacs are going to feel like they're settling because I require a simple(r) explanation of coronal ejections or irrational numbers. I mean, there's gotta be one out there who doesn't mind doing so if it means he gets his own walking database of poetry and fiction, philosophy and world religion, right? 

Right?

Blah. 

Stories

Ford's Theater really gets to me. 

Ford's Theater gets to me in a surprising way, but then again, the entire weekend has been surprising.

It'll take me hours to work out exactly why it gets to me, but when I leave I'm feeling funny--just a little bit off--and I don't quite know why. 

I'm wandering around the museum reading a story I already know and know well. It's the story of John Wilkes Booth's escape from D.C. after he shot President Lincoln. I'm familiar with the details, the places he stopped, his co-conspirators, how has plot changed after the Confederacy's surrender. What surprises me the most, what really worms its way under my skin, isn't Lincoln's assassination. It's not standing in the room where he passed, it's not even reading his second inaugural address later (my favorite piece of non-fiction word-smithing ever) at the Memorial.

Although, Jesus. That was incredible.

It isn't until I'm finished with Ford's Theater and the Lincoln Memorial and am sitting on the steps eating a PB&J that I realize what's upsetting me. It's Booth, unequivocally one of the greatest villains in American history that I feel sorry for. More than that, I feel like I understand Booth. At least, understand a little bit more about him than I expected.

Like I said, the entire weekend has been surprising.

***

A few years ago, on a road trip with a friend from graduate school, I started to tell stories about my childhood. 

I was driving and couldn't see the reaction the woman next to me was having, but I probably could have guessed. 

After about fifteen minutes, she reached across the car, put a hand on my arm and said "Kel, this is the most I've ever head you talk about yourself at one time and you're talking about feelings and what you think about things that aren't God and space and poetry. She paused and then continued. "I really want to affirm you in what you're doing right now. I think it's wonderful." 

When she was finished, I cleared my throat and asked about her thesis. Things were quiet for the next fifty miles. 

***

I spend too much time in my own head.

My graduate school friends would tease me about it. I could, apparently, intellectually eviscerate someone in class without much pause (a fact I attribute less to intelligence and more to writing in books and a good long-term memory) but the second someone said something that hurt or upset me on a personal level I'd get quiet and polite, leave the situation as soon as possible, and then resurface a few weeks later ready to talk.

I don't know how to fix this.

I don't know if it needs to be fixed.

I suspect it does.

***

The first time my friend accuses me (accuses, really, Kelly?) me of  "weirdly in touch with my emotions" I accuse him of being out of his head. 

It strikes me as a stupid thing to say, especially as the conversation that we've just had is about how it takes me the aforementioned two weeks to consider how I feel about, well, whatever. Sure, I can articulate immediate reactions to things "Your argument is specious." "I love jazz!" "Citation needed." "Everyone's I.Q. just dropped ten points based on overhearing that comment." But anything deeper than intellectual disgust or anger or sheer mind-blowing joy takes me longer to sort out. 

He takes a pull from his pint an insists. "Weirdly. In touch. With your emotions." 

It's a recurring fight we'll have for years, the sort of threadbare, comfortable argument that you good-naturedly bicker about without really caring about citations or I.Q. points but just need something comfortable and familiar. 

***

Anyway, I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking over notes and journal entries from the past few days when I turn to something I scribbled sometime in the past twenty-four hours, but I can't particularly remember where.

The problem with creating your own narrative is that it doesn't require peer review.

It sounds like the sort of thing I'd flip on the bedside light to note to myself (sleepily convinced of my own brilliance) or would pause to in front of an exhibit to write. Either way, I don't remember when I put it down, but when I read it I feel like someone has yanked my head back.

If you know anything about the history of the Lincoln Assassination it's that John Wilkes Booth was completely, utterly convinced that people would applaud him for assassinating Lincoln. For God's sake, he saw himself as an American Brutus, going so far as to shout sic semper tyrannis after he shot Lincoln.

Although, taking a moment for brief historical commentary. The suspension of habeas corpus? Dick move, Lincoln.

Back on topic, John Wilkes Booth spent a lot of time in his own head. He constructed an entire narrative in which he was the hero, where the somewhat controversial head of a nation was not merely controversial  but tyrannical.

This is what's sparking the strange feelings of . . . not empathy. Not understanding. Pity, probably (ask me again in a week) for Booth that I'm feeling.

The stories we tell--no, that's not quite right. The stories I tell about myself matter. The things I decide to air out, the places where I air them out, those are all reflections of how I view the world and my place in it. The fact that I can only say some things via text or when the lights are out, that it takes me weeks to be able to say how something impacted me matters. They're real life, edited and portrayed through the filter of a woman who struggles to spend time outside of her own head, who feels things (and feels them deeply) without being able to explain what she's feeling. And it's problematic, because there's no process for peer-review in these stories, the narrative that I construct is just that--the narrative I construct. The based upon a true story version of the world with which I interact every day.

While I'm certainly (I mean, I hope I'm not) engaging in narrative self-deception at the same scale as John Wilkes Booth, the possibility that I feel like I have even this much in common with him is deeply, profoundly disturbing.

At least, I think it is. Ask me in another two weeks and I'll be able to tell you for sure.

Rock Me

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

Every sweet song that comes on the radio is about me. Rather than walk through my neighborhood in the gathering dusk, I dance. I skip. I sing. Twice in the past week you could have driven down Marshall at around 7:40 and seen me pirouetting, for Christ's sake. I'm so frustratingly gooey and ridiculous that there are soberer, quiet moments where I think:

Oh my god. I hate myself.  

I can't help it. I haven't felt like this in ages.

***

I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I'm cuddled up on the couch, wrapped in a cottony, fluffy blanket. There's a woodstove at my feet and the sound of rain on the roof. The entire room is lit by twinkly white lights and candles. I am warm. I am happy. I am loved. 

I've woken up to the sound of a cello, a guitar, and a three part harmony on one of my favorite songs. I sing along (quietly enough that I don't disturb the delicate balance of the other voices) and smile to myself. 

Wagon Wheel was my introduction to bluegrass. It's the song that inevitably is played whenever my musical friends get together. It's a song I can remember hearing for the first time with the kind of crystalline clarity that makes me suspect it's actually a false memory. It's a song that I have to hear to the end whenever it's started. It's the song I sing in the shower and we sang on my 25th birthday sitting on the floor of my shitty, mouse-infested graduate school apartment. 

Yikes. I suddenly realize how gross that floor was and by extension, how  gross sitting on it was. 

When I was attending a Benedictine college I heard a lot of chatter about the values of hospitality and community. I did not realize how deeply those values would impact my life until full of risotto and wine and conversation, I would stay up late having marathon conversations about God and Love and Truth and Children. Conversations where things that had influenced my life abstractly as a theologian (Faith, Love, Charity) were brought to bear on the life I was living and the decisions I was making about community, kindness, and sustainability. 

Somehow everything was always proceeded or followed by music. Huge, angry intellectual sparring matches devolved into harmonies and melodies. Hurt feelings were soothed away by familiar choruses and even if we didn't all believe in an afterlife, we sure as hell loved to sing about it.

And always (usually at my request) came Wagon Wheel. It's been such a part of my life that I can remember each of the specific instances in which we sang it as a group and why those days were important and what they meant in my developing adulthood. I smile when I think about the future times we'll sing it and wonder what those occasions will mean and how they will shape me the way all those past late nights have. I can't help but feel like the song has wormed its way into my DNA. That, should I ever actually have kids, loving it will be passed down through the generations until a 100 years from now some descendant of mine will be around a campfire asking "Hey, does anyone know that old song . . ."

***

The past ten years of my adult life have been a series of experiments on how to (and please forgive the douchiness of what I'm about to say) live authentically. I've learned how community grows organically and what I can do to help that community thrive (Pro tip: live nearby). I've failed in building that community and authenticity in some places (the North Country) but have laid down deep roots in others (who knew that Stearns, Hennepin, and Ramsey counties could all occupy the same space in my heart? Jesus, who knew that I would fall in love with Stearns County?). Growing up has been a process of deciding that I want to live a life where community, charity, patience, and kindness are not just things I think about on holidays or when someone shows me some small example of them, but are things that I want to influence my daily life and work. 

And before I sound too ohmygodi'mtotallyselfactualized here, I need to say that these things are really difficult for me. They're well, virtues I guess, that I don't have. At all. Anyone who has had the misfortune to drive with me through a traffic jam or catch me when I'm late can attest to how quickly I lose my cool. I'm not particularly good at being attentive to the present, when I'm tired or hungry I have a razor-sharp tongue, and nine times out of ten I would love to tell community to just sod off already. 

***

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

I'm so in love that it makes me giddy.

Have I mentioned that I'm so in love that it makes me completely fucking annoying? 

God help the entire world when I actually fall in love with someone rather than something.

For the time being, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that what I'm in love with is the life that I am slowly, agonizingly building for myself. A life where special occasions are where frustration and kindness, community and solitude, silence and harmonies all co-exist.

So rock me, momma like a wagon wheel. 

Love and Rockets

Might as well turn on some TNG.

It's the thought that runs through my head when my eyes pop open at 11:00 on Friday night. I was asleep, deeply, for about an hour before a nightmare woke me up. It was one of those nightmares that requires me to switch on the bedside lamp and put my feet on the floor. I know this kind of post-nightmare awake. I'm not going to get back to sleep for another hour at least, and I still have that last season of The Next Generation to get through, so I might as well watch an episode or two. I am entirely annoyed because I wanted to get back into the swing of things with this Saturday. I was going to get back into my North Country schedule of working out and errands and a logical, orderly Saturday. Grumbling, I crawl out of bed and head to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I flip over my phone to check the time and realize I have a string of messages from a friend. He's awake, he stayed up to watch a rocket launch, and is jazzed about it. There's also a hilarious not-entirely-subtext of one-upmanship about the messages that's also not, well, exactly unwarranted. He's been on the receiving side of a bunch of gushy messages about how much I love my new city and how happy I am with my life and the magical course my summer has taken. (Should I revisit? Biked 150 miles in two days, Dessa, Gaiman, St. Louis wedding, family vacation, Milwaukee road trip, moving to my favorite city, swimming underneath the stars in Northern Minnesota, pause for breath, phew.) But despite the fact that I've had a remarkable summer and have been extremely ohmygodmylifeissowonderfulandiloveeveryoneandeverythinginit I am still so jealous that he got to see this rocket launch that I could spit. And I don't hesitate to tell him. The conversation (d)evolves over the next few hours and after dwelling briefly on love and how we fall in love differently and if we're to blame for being (a little bit) crazy, we wrap up with Christina Hendricks (seriously) and the next thing I know it's 2:00 am and I never did get around to those Trek episodes

***

Realizing that you've been dead wrong in how you perceive yourself is a completely humiliating experience.

Last fall, right around this time of year, I wrote about how I suspected that I might be part Vulcan. It was partly the fault of graduate school, where I was among the least outwardly emotional people there (unless you dissed Karl Rahner in some capacity). My friends joked that I was a cyborg and that they weren't certain what to do with me.

When I wrote that post last year, it felt right. It felt like "This is what I've going through. This is how I've always been. This is how I will always be."  

It felt true.

But the course of the past twelve months has consisted of slowly pulling my heart out of the glass jar where I was keeping it hidden away (all of which has been, of course, painstakingly documented here) and discovering how to engage with my emotions appropriately again.

And it's been complicated and difficult and blah blah blah. And I absolutely do no trust the person I am these days. And I need permission to be happy. And I largely expect that this whole grand experiment is about a day and a half away from crashing down around my head.

But the fact of the matter is that I was never part Vulcan. Or I was, but it was because I did some kind of crazy mind-meld with an equally crazy bitch who then took over my life for ohidon'tknow FIVE YEARS. That person was never actually me.

Part of the reason I finally realized this is because I've recently(ish) met people who actively turn off their emotions. They choose not to feel things, I suspect in the same way I decided that I was going to turn over the reins to the other woman living in my head for all those years. Granted they don't seem depressed, anxious, or angry, but they do just choose not to feel things.

Sounds a bit sociopath, doesn't it?

***

Inevitably after three hours of talking about love and rockets, I can't get to sleep. I make a second cup of lavender tea and pick up my book about the Victorians and the invention of modern crime (I wonder why I'm an insomniac who's prone to nightmares.) I should, if anything, be even more annoyed at myself for staying up so late, for allowing myself to get drawn into a conversation that would keep me awake and just bitch my Saturday plans. I shouldn't be the type of woman who makes such illogical decisions. 

When I finish my tea and snap off the light, I mentally rearrange my next day. I cast aside the workout in favor of an afternoon nap and hopefully catching up with one of my best friends, who is in town for the day. I leave myself some time for reading and push away any thoughts of how I made the wrong decision. Because for as illogical as it is to toss aside a lovely, planned Saturday morning with lots of crossing things off to-do lists (which would, objectively, be delightful) I think that this is the person I actually want to be, the person I was once, the kind of girl who's kept awake thinking about love and rockets. 

Happy

It's one month until my birthday.

Unless you are blissfully out of contact with me outside of this blog, you probably know that I love my birthday. I love my birthday the way a five year old loves her birthday. I get excited for it months in advance. I buy a new birthday dress for my parties. I would wear a birthday crown if someone got one for me without any sense of irony whatsoever.

And, let's be honest. My birthday is at the end of September, but I pretty much treat the entire month--from Labor Day until the day after my party--as one whole ohmygodgiantparty. I'm serious. My current calender for the next month has me busy every weekend doing things I adore from star-gazing at a cabin to staying in a yurt drinking wine and singing Skinny Love to standing in the National Museum of Health and Medicine looking at the bullet John Wilkes Booth fired at President Lincoln and thinking about freedom and self-determination. All, of course, concluded with an immense party at the end of the month.

I love my birthday because 364 other days of the year I feel completely unremarkable. I mean, for God's sake, I've spent a significant portion of my life hoping to be recruited to the X-Men, of course an ordinary life doesn't measure up. I'm reasonably bright, but I'm never the smartest person in the room. The only times I'm the prettiest girl in the bar are the times I'm the only girl in the bar. I work hard, but I needed to install Procrastinator to keep myself from going off on web tangents. My birthday is the one day out of the year where none of that seems to matter.

I love my birthday.

***

I don't feel crazy. 

I seem to be having all of my brainstorms while making the bed. Perhaps my mother was on to something for my entire adolescence when she tried to get me to make it before school. I smile a little bit as I tug the quilt straight. I don't feel crazy.

A year ago, I told Kerry that I thought I needed to go into therapy. Stress had caused all of the undiagnosed anxiety and depression to flower into OCD years earlier, which had been getting progressively worse when added along with sheer loneliness. 

A year ago I finally realized that I was so crazy I could barely fake sanity anymore. 

It's this morning, making the bed before going to work that I realize it. 

 I'm not faking anymore. 

***

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question actually catches me off guard. I've been trying to explain the fizziness I've been carrying around in my chest lately. I can vaguely remember being this person. The person whose enthusiasms took over her life, whose passions and interests were a little eclectic, but always pursued to mastery. Who, among the right people, was the human equivalent of a bottle of champagne. I remember this person. I loved this person.

I don't trust this person.

Why should I? She abandoned me when I needed her, badly, when I moved to the North Country. She left me behind and went off to party with her friends, only showing up when I needed to go to the Cities or to see my graduate school friends, and even then she was relatively more reserved.

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question is still lingering. It is normally this is the kind of question that is calibrated exactly to instigate an emotional shut-down for me. I don't like presumption, even on the part of my friends, and I really don't like when they say something even remotely insightful that I haven't considered myself.

It's the kind of question that would normally have me sign off of chat, or feign a phone call from my mother and say my goodbyes. It's the kind of question that makes me pause and reconsider a friendship. It's the kind of question that, more often than not, makes me push someone back to an arm's length away. And I don't know if it's the physical distance or the confessional nature of a friendship conducted via a keyboard and computer screen, but when Preston asks, I don't blow him off. 

I don't answer either.

Instead, I say a silent prayer of gratitude that we're not video-chatters and reach for the Kleenex box.

Yes. 

***

The fizz hasn't evaporated yet. Part of me keeps thinking that it will. 

This is probably all birthday excitement. I tell myself. You'll go back to being an ohmygodunbearablecrazybitch on September 29th. My OCD symptoms, which are entirely gone now, will flare up again. I'll withdraw into myself and let loneliness and self-doubt become my constant companions again. 

But there's a tiny part of my brain, the part that exists somewhere between the effervescence and the moroseness that reminds me to think about last year, who cajoles me to remember what I wrote about how birthdays mark the passage of time, they celebrate the goals we've accomplished, they remind us of the work we still have left to do. 

Regardless of the fact that that Kelly was crazier than a shithouse rat, she was right. There's something about birthdays that makes them(or should make them) magical things. They're the day out of the year when you can put on your party dress and feel like the prettiest  girl in the room. Where you best a friend in an argument and bask triumphantly, momentarily, erroneously in the satisfaction of being the smartest person in the room. It should be a day when you don't think about having never exhibited a mutation or the relationships you've failed in over the past year. 

Birthdays should be the day of the year (month in some of our cases) that you feel that you've accomplished something in the preceding 364 days. Where you feel like whatever it was about the past year--whether it falling into/out of love, moving, keeping the same job you've had for years, is maybejustatinybitremarkable.  

At least, that's how I plan to celebrate this year. 

Lines

My best friend does not know I'm dating someone. 

Granted, she lives in London, but this is still unusual for us. I try not to think about what it means, why I haven't said anything to her. I also try not to think about what means that my roommates don't know I'm seeing someone, that I won't introduce him to any of my friends, that we only see one another after long nights out when my house is empty. That every time we do see one another I feel awful when he leaves. That sometimes when he's angry and yelling it frightens me. And how often he's angry and yelling.

I try not to think about it.

I need some comfort but he's screening my calls. I never expected to be this person. The woman who keeps calling back. Who leaves angry and sad voicemails. The type of woman who hears Ain't Too Proud to Beg in her head on a regular basis. The kind of woman who regularly recognizes the pleading note in her voice, and who sometimes thinks I don't love you and who recognizes this is not how we're supposed to treat one another, but who just can't stop calling back.

It is one of what feels like a thousand fights. One of the late Friday nights after an angry voicemail has sparked off angry texts from him and apologies from me until suddenly he's there and screaming on a street corner and I'm trying to walk away.

It feels like we have done this a thousand times. It feels like we will always do this.

It ends the way it always ends. I'm crying in public, something I hate, and he conjures up a cab and just wants to make sure I get home safely. And in the cab it's his turn. He starts to plead with me. You're crazy. It's not like that. I promise. You're crazy. That's stupid. Why would you think that? And when we get to my house, softly, I'm sorry. 

That's all it takes, I guess, because I don't know whose hands are whose and which of us is pulling the other up the staircase. And in a few minutes in the dark I hear I told you that you were crazy and I wonder how we ended up here, again.  

After he's gone (he never stays), I will say These are the shitty things we do to one another. It helps, a little, to draw lines around what just happened, to make it both of our fault. Saying these are the shitty things we do to one another splits the fault. Some of it belongs to him, but I'm sure most of it is mine.

These are the shitty things we do to one another. 

 I will say it again and again and again until the sun comes up.

***

My Mother is Concerned.

We're on vacation as a family for the first time in years, and I'm in a particularly bad mood. Something on television the night before set me off, and I can't seem to pull it back together. I'm driving her to the grocery store and she's listening to the lyrics to a song I've restarted twice since we've been in the car together. She asks, tentatively, "What is this song about?"

I don't mean my voice to have a hard, bitter edge to it.

"The shitty things men do to women."

She's quiet, I'm quiet, and the album plays to the next track. When she speaks her voice is softer than I'm used to hearing. 

"You know not all men to shitty things to women, right Kelly Marie?" 

I want to be able to tell her yes.

***

I put lines around the relationship. I mark its beginning and where it went wrong and after the fight on the corner or the one at my house or the one I leave a party to have over the phone I say This is the end. I'm putting a line here. This is enough. 

Even after I've said enough, enough hurting one another, enough of doing shitty things to one another, enough tearing one another to shreds, I still leave voicemails. We still text and fight. I still cry, frequently, and he still comes over and whispers in the dark You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. And I feel crazy. For the first time in my life, I feel like there is something deeply wrong with me.

I draw lines around it. I try not to think about it.

When he leaves (because he never stays) I wonder what will need to happen for it to finally be enough.

***

Even with years of retrospection, I take blame for things that weren't my fault. I say here are the shitty things we did to one another. Because saying here are the shitty things you did to me is too hard, too painful. It is too true to say you hurt me. Intentionally. Deliberately. And with great satisfaction. You hurt me and you loved it.

So I draw lines around it. Because it is too big to process.  And I think that I've drawn the lines successfully until I wake up screaming nonononononononono from a nightmare. I think those lines are keeping things in place until I try to ask someone out and am relieved when he says no so that I won't have to worry about drawing the lines in the right spot this time.

I realize this isn't staying behind the lines. And that I am so tired of redrawing those lines.

You hurt me. 

Lists

My life is governed by  lists.

I make a to-do list every single day, whether I'm at work or hanging out around the house. I make them on the weekends. I make them when I go on vacations. I write them down on legal pads, on scrap paper, on checklists on my phone. I get an incredible feeling of satisfaction from crossing things off the lists. I am uneasy when that to-do list still has all of its items listed on it at the end of the day.

I make immense lists of the books I want to read, the historical sites I want to visit, the films I need to watch, the pieces of writing I'd like to do. I keep these lists on my desk at work, with a photo of them on my phone so that if, say, I'm at the library and I can't decide on a book to check out, I can whip the list out of my purse and think Oh yeah, I never did read The Glass Key. Or, Oh God, what was I thinking? I'm never going to read Moby Dick and I have to come to terms with it.

I love lists.

***

This week I crossed something off my bucket list.

I haven't been great about what's on my bucket list. There are the big things I want to achieve: write a book about the Scopes Trial, go to Gettysburg, see The Royal Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet. But as far as the smaller things, things like "Seeing the Dred Scott Courthouse Site" don't occur to me until afterward. I've always wanted to see General Sherman's graveside, but it was never on the bucket list. More than that, I put a ton of things on the list that don't actually matter to me, but are reflections of . . . the people I'm dating? The friends I've made? I don't know, but they don't belong there. So usually when I "cross something off my bucket list" it's because I've decided that it shouldn't have been there in the first place.

This was not one of those. This was an actual ohmygodIcan'tbelievethatactuallyhappened moments. I'm pleased there's photographic evidence of it happening because I'd be tempted to think that I dreamed it otherwise.

I met my favorite author.

I've met a number of authors that I admire throughout the course of my life. It's the gift of going to a college that takes bringing in writers to talk about writing very seriously. I remember all of the questions I asked them, what they said to me as they signed my books. Sarah Vowell and I talked about the Kennedy assassination. I told Billy Collins my mother hated my poetry but loved his. I laughed so loudly from the second row of a David Sedaris reading that he shot me a look. 

This was different. It was, simply, too intense to describe. I can't even remember what this man said to me when I said hello and told him what I had to tell him. I can say that he was very, very kind to a sweaty, shaky, stuttery, earnest young woman. And that when I made it back out to my car I cried. And I walked away deeply grateful for this man and his work. 

When I got back to my bucket list on Tuesday afternoon I looked at it for a long moment before reaching out to scratch the item off. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

This week has been a messy, emotional one for me. In the space of seven days, I flew to St. Louis, attended one of my good friend's wedding, spent the 4th of July at the site where Dred Scott was tried, visited a ton of Civil War graves, flew back to Minnesota, met this author, came back up to the North Country and packed the rest of my house. I'm not complaining. It was a really good week.

But now that my entire life is in boxes, now that the internet has been disconnected, and my clothes have been sorted into vacation, second vacation, need after first move, can be stored until after second move suitcases, now that I've read literally all the books left in my house I find myself with a little too much time on my hands. 

Of course I would use that time for unproductive self-reflection. 

I feel like a failure. 

I confide this to exactly one person during the course of the week in a moment of profound vulnerability that I hate myself for later. 

***

I'm slinking out of the North Country.

I'll admit it. This place whupped me. The winters were too dark, too cold, too snowy. The summers (ha!) were brief and cool. The people were (with a few notable exceptions) distant. The goddamn roads have potholes that could take off your front wheel. 

When I moved here two years ago, I didn't know if it was permanent, but I anticipated leaving with some indications of success. A boyfriend (or at least, a relationship that lasted longer than my normal six months), a hugely successful professional tenure, I was going to write my book, figure out how to be a spiritually fulfilled adult without being Catholic, finally learn to play my harmonica . . .

I did not succeed here.

More than that, I suspect I could have succeeded here. I could have made this city work, these people open up to me. I could have adapted to snow and darkness and cold. I could have done it. I could have done it if I had gone to see a therapist earlier. I could have done it if I had started taking anti-depressants. I could have done it if I just learned how to be happy. 

But I didn't. I didn't accomplish any of those things on my North Country list. And now instead of leaving amid tearful going away parties, poetic break-ups, and enormously lucrative counter-offers, I am sneaking out of town with as little fanfare as possible. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

I feel like even more of a failure for opening up the way I did this week. For getting shaky and struggling not to cry while I said "This book saved my life." For admitting that this part of the country pushed me right up to the brink and left me mess that I've been slowly sorting out. For saying out loud "I couldn't make this work."

***

Somehow, despite never having added "Surround yourself with kind people" to a list, that is exactly what I've managed to do. When I stutter out what I want to say to the author he pauses and reaches out for my hand and lets me give him a hug. While I'm mentally slapping myself for admitting to failing here in the North, I receive a thoughtful, insightful response that burns me with its compassion.

I'm never going to be able to shake the habit of writing out lists for myself, like I'll never be able to stop measuring success by what I've managed to cross off. But I hope that I've finally managed to learn to put the right things on the list.