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. 

Alone Awake

And still I know that love is never free.

It bows your head and bends your knees. 

-Dessa 

I'm never more grateful to be with someone than on Sundays.

Sunday is my favorite day of the week, the day that I guard fiercely. The week is for work and errands. Friday is for opening the pressure valve in whatever way. Saturday is for crossing things off the to-do list. Sunday is for doing nothing. It's for long, relaxing bike rides. It's for lazy Sunday brunches, coffee with the paper on the porch, lounging in your pajamas.

And being with someone on a Sunday? Well, it's a bit like that old song, isn't it?

This Sunday is both different and not different. This past week was emotionally vampiric and the weekend was wonderful and exhausting. I traveled over the weekend, as I've done most weekends lately. I saw a movie that was deeply satisfying on a level I didn't realize until much later. There was a live concert that has left my voice scratchy. There were irritations too, the inability to find an apartment, the lack of sleep for three nights running, but those were mild. And now they're being quietly soothed away.

It's a bit after 9:00 and we've just gone to bed. I'm wiped out from the weekend. He recognizes that while I came home happy today, my feathers were a little ruffled from too little sleep and too much socializing. I'm also just a touch nervous about what's coming down the pike for us. Whatever we're doing, we both know that it has an expiration date. We knew it when we met for that first game of Scrabble.

 Neither of us could possibly care less.

So we've set the alarms and have crawled into bed. It's hothothot, that sticky, damp, late summer heat that makes me glad I've recently cut off all my hair and anxious to move back north. It's too warm to sleep curled together, but he's reading to me from a historical fiction novel and slowly twining my curls around his fingers.  I make a tiny, quiet noise that's somewhere between longing and contentment and somewhere in my drowsy mind I think Iamtooyoungtoappreciatethismoment. And I am right. But for now, his voice reading quietly and his fingers in my hair are the last thing I know until the alarm beeps at 8:00 am.

'Cause I didn't come to play it safe.

I came to win or lose with you.

-Dessa 

What do you give up?

I can't stop asking myself that question lately. I ask it when deciding between a ten mile road race and a duathalon in September. I ask it when packing my suitcase, thinking about the lovely cool weather I'm leaving here in North Country.

I ask t it while I'm standing in the middle of a crowd at First Avenue, watching as one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite musicians takes the stage and brings the house down.

I wanted part of this essay to be about that show. And what it was like to see an artist I admire in a venue and a city I love, with people I treasure. And I think I could have written it, if I had not trusted the intervening 48 hours to help me solidify my thoughts on it. But the more I try to write about it, the more I am frustrated by the slipperiness of words and experience. 

I am a different person after the show.

It's sounds rather grandiose. Like you should automatically dismiss everything that comes before and after because the person writing is obviously the hysterical type, and cannot be trusted to give an accurate account of what happened. She's the worst kind of unreliable narrator.

Fuck off.

It is the purpose of good art, good writing, is it not? To squirm its way subtly into our heads and hearts. To hit us across the face with a two-by-four and change how we look at something. To quietly devastate us and leave us trembling and moved and profoundly, deeply different.

But there's no sword without an edge

And I sleep uneasily when you're not in my bed. 

-Dessa

What do you give up?

I ask it while watching my friends fall in love, thinking to myself what dreams, ambition, ideals are you giving up to be with this person? Are they worth it?

And do you ever really know?

I only live alone awake,

'Cause every night, yeah, you pass through. 

-Dessa

How can it be 8 am already?

It's the first thing that pops into my mind as I reach blindly for the alarm, quietly cursing and brushing my long hair our of my eyes. It's just there, under the fictionalized account of Thomas Cromwell's life that I fell asleep reading, which is just beyond the pillow I fell asleep wrapped around. I'm a little groggy, the result of an OTC sleeping pill and nearly twelve hours of deep sleep. But when I stumble out of bed, I'm smiling. As I'm getting ready for work I try to decide what possible significance July 1st can have that dropped me out of bed in such a good mood. It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg? No, that's not it. One week until I meet Neil Gaiman? Possibly,  but there's a lot going on between now and then. My impending trip to St. Louis? No, I've still got to pack and travel, that seems impossibly far off.

Fully dressed and humming an Etta James song to myself, I grab my keys and my work bag and head out the door. Whatever pleasant dream or memory was there in the moments before I woke up this morning, I'm in a good mood on a Monday. I'm not about to give that up.