It is Saturday night in Valencia California.
Al green is on in Starbucks, singing about how She Used to Be My Girl.
I am writing this on an outdoor patio, typing to his words and the hum of female voices at the table behind me.
Teenagers wander out of the Starbs holding whipping topped pink drinks and talking over each other through braces and straws. Plates and forks collide at the hollow form restaurant next door. A gauche water fountain in the shape of a little girl and a puppy, gurgles. The women behind me talk about their hair, other women’s hair, the Bible.
I came here to write. To work on my book. Because I haven’t worked on my book for weeks. Because when I do, I find some sort of calm that’s been missing lately.
Lately, I have been all ahumm with a sense of loss, of foreboding I’ve not felt in a while.
Driving home from Los Angeles earlier, hung over and in the kind of dulled and nasty mood that gin and tonic and too little sleep affect upon a pillowy mind, I listened a while to a podcast on peace from samsara through mindfulness and meditation. The teacher, an ordained Buddhist nun to whom I oftentimes listen, lectured on the nature of suffering, and the importance of RAIN – Recognize, Allow, Investigate and Name – to alleviating anxiety. Cessation of suffering comes from accepting your feelings, she said, From turning towards your fears, not running from them.
Sometimes I get this frightened feeling, this humm, and forget that there’s nothing to tack it to. Nothing in my life has gone missing, of late. I’ve looked around. Searched under stacks of paper. The space between the couch cushions. The drawers into which I sometimes shove unpaid bills, unpalatable mail. There’s nothing there. Everything’s in order. So why now? Why this familiar sense of fear, of mourning? Perhaps it’s only ever the potential for things to be lost that sends us into sadness.
The Buddhist nun I listen to talks about the importance of presence. Of compassion. For oneself and others. Place the fearful mind, she says, In the cradle of loving kindness. Sometimes she says this and I think, Oh yea, and breathe deep and feel myself again.
I remember buying a box of fluorescent washable markers that winter I lived on Water Street. I remember dancing with Richa and drawing all over the wall length window panes that looked out on an endless mess of office buildings and their rows of darkened rooms. TRUST TRUST I wrote. TRUST LOVE she wrote. And we danced and laughed and the wind blew off the seaport and up against our windows.
The sun went down by five each night that year. Maybe it did every winter in the city but it all seems darker on Fulton street, where the lights of Chinatown wane and businesses are sparse. I remember never being warm enough there. I remember never wearing the kind of jacket that might keep me warm enough there.
Instead, and looking for some heat, I curled into the cradle of an insistence upon positivity. Held myself, shivering, inside a hull of heart hardened numbness in the name of it. I wrote TRUST all over the place and refused to allow myself a single doubtful thought. Still, thinking back on my little self, floundering so earnestly in the cold, fighting so sincerely to keep her fear at bay, I cannot help but love her for her effort, however misguided. And so this evening I pause and pull out my pen and write TRUST in black ink on the thin strip of skin between my thumb and pointer finger.
When I go into Starbucks for a refill on my tea, the server touches my tattoo when he reaches for my money and asks me what I have planned for tonight. Work, I say and he raises his eyebrows and asks if I’d like my tea extra sweet. I can’t tell if he is making fun of me for being the nerd with the Macbook on a Saturday night, or hitting on me so I say No thank you and smile but refuse to meet his eyes when he says, Have a beautiful night.
And later, once I’ve sat back down by the fountain and started to stare blankly at pages of my writing illuminated by the laptop screen, a waiter from Wolf Creek Grill will approach, sit down and say What’s up, and ask me what I have going on tonight and I will tell him Work also and he will say Really? Are you sure? And I’ll nod yes, adding, Work and recovery, but thank you for asking and he’ll say Alright and walk away, leaving me wondering if I look lost or sick or have This One’s Off Her Game plastered on my forehead, a beacon of vulnerability blinking there for all the hungry boys.
Their hunger is the sort of stuff I used to take something from. The kind I used to use to keep me company on those nights I walked into an empty apartment and thought isn’t it better this way and took off my eyeliner and pulled on my sweatpants and ate ramen in front of this month’s Vogue or a flashing TV screen. It’s the kind that used to warm the beds of boys whose whispers and words I took in and took for true after two shots and four flutes of champagne with their drink tickets at the bar. It is the sort of attention that used to make me feel special and now only makes me feel all the more disposable, all the more alone.
I haven’t yet decided what to do about this.
Sometimes I think the pain of actual loss – breakup, divorce, death – is significantly less biting than the anticipation of it. Sometimes I wonder when I became so damaged as to expect it at every turn. To walk around with walls up, battements raised in anticipation of disappointment and loss. I have learned to create the very outcome I am in constant fear of.
I haven’t yet discovered how to turn this trend around. I am learning. It is a poky process.
After that winter on Water Street, with the wind and the snow storms and the rows of lightless buildings, Richa and I moved. Replaced the darkness of the Seaport with the unending movement of Union Square. It’s so much easier to go out here, I remember saying, twirling around in our new apartment, which was roughly a sixth of the size of our previous, palatial place. Everything will be lighter here, I said and strapped on my heels and strode out and into darkness again. Into strangers and strands of pulsating color. Into white lines and the way we waved vodka cranberries at each other across the haze of it all.
I do not do that anymore. It was not easy to stop.
And I am proud of myself. For the unshakable sense of self I found when I slipped off the stilettos and stopped pretending to be somebody I knew I never was. There remains, however, some body of fear that slides itself inside me and turns itself on beneath my skin. It is at once a shell of the past - old stories, patterns, repetitions, I cannot forget – and the figure I fought against years ago. That vulnerable body I blocked out with white lights and lines and strangers and skin, then forced myself to see, to surrender to.
And I have, for the most part, surrendered. Have learned to love her, my vulnerable self. To tolerate her imperfections. To fold arms around them, to hold her little body, in silence, for however long it takes her to become still. To become the words that fold, curiously, into these questions.
