Who will zip my dress?

Things I wish I could do:

• blog more regularly
• commit to doing homework
• be more flexible
• sleep

Last night was our band and choir concert. After the choir sung, we sat in the balcony as we watched the band. Feeling slim in my tight black dress, my mind drifted from wishing that I were on-stage playing the bassoon to wondering what my future held: would I ever be in a band again? would I be any good? will I wear this dress for concert-black? who will zip my dress?

It's tight--it's gotta be tight for it be look so hot. Seriously. I never feel this way, but this dress is so simple, and black is always flattering. When I think about my future in some job where I get to look nice often and can wear my sexy black dress, I imagine myself walking into the confident Arizona sun--a good feeling, where warmth eminates deeper into the dark fabric. This great scene in my mind really has setbacks, though. I love the thought of it, but so often I find myself thinking of the event and not the path that it takes to get there. I've got to get into the dress somehow.

I've thought a lot about where I want to live when I go West in a few months. I've narrowed it down to the Phoenix area, a simple choice, and actually, not narrow at all. My cousin offered I stay with him and his wife until I get a bit more settled. While I'm grateful for the offer, it doesn't feel right; I need to be on my own. However, the more that I think about how great it would be to go out there and just be on my own, the more I realize that there are things that I just won't be able to do. Solitude is something that I have not known for a long time.

Naturally, I want nothing more than to go out there and be surrounded by my friends and family. WAKE UP, Natalie. They have their own lives. I just don't know how to wrap my head around the reality of this: I have dreamt of moving there for so long that the prospect of it actually happening seems consistently out-of-reach. How do I figure out what I want to do with my life if I am just tagging into another circle that I already have semi-established out there? I've never actually fully put myself out there on my own (excluding my Italy trip, but sadly, those connections have not been very consistent since), and that scares me more than anything.

I've decided that I need to be flexible. If I like whatever I land into in Arizona, then great! If not, that's fine too. Maybe some time away from academia will give me a chance to figure out my next line of education. I really don't know. But I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid of settling into a new city only to leave again. I am afraid of having many homes.

I like to think of myself as an independent young woman. I am very wrong. I accept any time that my parents offer to buy groceries, and I still take my laundry home because I hate spending all of my quarters at the laundromat. I am no where near "grown-up," but I tell myself that I am so that I think that I will actually survive in some civilized fashion when living alone.

I realized recently that society wants women to be independent. My sexy black dress is a hand-me-down from many years ago that I only recently grew into (which is both fortunate and unfortunate in several ways). The zipper is on the back of the dress. When I was younger, say my early teens, I would twist my flexible shoulders down to zip the bottom, then meet the zipper half-way up the path by thrusting my elbows above my head and grasping the tip of the metal clasp with all that my fingers could reach. I would then pull the zipper the final stretch and smile at my independence--my own sort of rebellion; I didn't need my mother to help me anymore.

Today, I wore a new dress, a more professional yet (hopefully) fashionable dress. The zipper is on the side. After pulling the dress over my head and sticking my lanky arms through the sleeve-holes, I reached across my left side and zipped straight up from my hip. I felt accomplished to have gotten dressed in such a smooth, sleek motion.

I don't understand yet what it truly means to live alone. Being in college does anything but prepare you for independent living--is there such thing as silence? can I really have both a kitchen and a bathroom? can I really eat whatever food is in the fridge? CAN I REALLY NOT HAVE TO CLIMB A LADDER TO GET INTO MY BED? (After two years, I never want to see a bunkbed again in my life. Never.)

"Katlin, will you zip me please?" As much as we argue, I still rely on Katlin for many little things. She steps into the bathroom and looks at the dress.
"Uhh, can you hold this?" She pulls the dress together at the top, expecting me to keep it like that.
"I can't reach that." I'm definitely not as flexible as I was when I was twelve. She scoffs.
"This would be much easier if you..." She grunts the zipper to a stop--that tight spot at the peak of my curves that weren't there those years ago when I could zip straight up my spine that stood parallel to my body's silhouette.
She sighs and lifts her knee to the small of my back, pushing to hold the dress down while using her left hand to hold the two sides together and her right to pull the zipper up. If only she had three hands.
I would have helped, but I was too focused on sucking in every part of my midsection before the fat comments started.
"Phew!" The dress is successfully zipped. It's tight in the middle, just enough to accentuate all the right places. The shoulders are loose, almost enough for the straps to slide to the edge of my shoulders.

So as I sat in that balcony, thinking about how great the dress felt, I sunk a little. Would I ever wear it in that desert sun? I imagined myself getting in my car, half-dressed, and driving to my cousin's house, just to ask to be zipped up. Then I scratched that out and imagined living with some anonymous man who would sensually zip along my curves, appreciating the zz of each tooth as the fabric pulled tighter. Then I scratched that out (clearly, romance can not be my to-do list anytime soon, though the thoughts are nice!) and realized what it would actually be--me standing frutrated in front of a mirror, trying to see enough to reach and then getting frustrated, probably crying, and changing into something with buttons.

Never Apologize

So this seems as good a time as any to start actually blogging--or at least attempting to. In Creative Nonfiction class, we read excerpts from Julie Powell's Julie/Julia and watched a snippet of an episode of The French Chef. The excerpts gave me comfort in the fact that a young woman could use some side project to hold her life together, even if that means making it fall apart more first. Further, Julia Child's hilarious, yet seemingly stoic, personality inspired me to step into the kitchen. (No, no, this isn't another food blog! Maybe...)

Every time I think I have things under control, I realize how much I don't. I crack under pressure, but I can't let myself fall apart. I am the yolk dropping into a bowl with a plop! with just enough buoyancy to keep from breaking. According to Julia, though, I needn't worry about my breaking yolks--"never apologize." They're omelettes anyways; I mean, that's the solution, right? Break and blend and whisk the yolks until they are no more discernible from each other or their whites. God, I am so alone.

I am twenty years old. Twenty. Two decades old. I can't even drink legally yet, but I keep getting these moments of panic where I start to think my life is over. I've lived it all, though I've barely lived at all, and I can do nothing but push forward through some set of routine to keep my body going.

I woke up one morning and wondered what I should eat for breakfast. I need to use up my eggs before they expire. Oh God, I am twenty years old, and my eggs are on the verge of expiring! I thought that I wanted to do my own thing for a while, but too often I felt this urging to fall in love and finish my life. (Why does love seem like such an ending?) During the past year, I spent a lot of time pretending that we were immortal. My cousin Derek was hospitalized most of 2011 due to complications that began with pneumonia, complicated by his DMD. He had always been the other half of my every "we." I could feel this ticking--like the elephant in the room, only this elephant was snoring while wearing a neon yellow tutu. I'm really good at pushing out whatever I don't want in my life. I turned the snoring elephant into a meditating Buddha in my mind, and I felt like I could hold onto that peace all the way to nirvana. 

Then Derek died. He died, and the prospect of death became real--I could, and would, die too. It was that moment when the ticking became my own. And here I am--trying to pick up the eggshells from the floor (never apologize), while I pretend like my yolks aren't longing to be mixed and blended and, oh God, worse than expiring, cooked. Cooked: entirely brewed into one being with ______. No one. With no one. 

"What are your first thoughts after watching Julia Child?"

"There is no way that those eggs are cooked!" I sassed at my prof's question. I have a tendency of saying ridiculous things to avoid some of the serious class discussions. 

Well, for what it's worth (if anything), I was right. Well, maybe. I've determined that there is a list of factors that I could have messed up:

• The pan wasn't hot enough. On my first try, the eggs weren't sizzly bubbling as Julia showed. Maybe my skillet was too cheap? Though, Julia sure stressed that there was no need to have anything more than a cheap skillet!
• Julia did pour a trickle of water into her eggs, but I didn't; she said it was an option!
• I can't have been shaking the skillet correctly. It splashed and jiggled, and each crest left me flinching back, as if I had a sparkler shooting sporadically in my hand. Nevertheless, the top of the egg remained gooey. 
• Julia said two-three eggs. I used two. Were they too many for the size of my pan?
• Maybe it's just the fact that I can't get the terminology right: pan? skillet? I don't know. Something. Surely Julie Powell didn't pronounce Julia's recipes correctly on day one. 

Maybe I don't need to worry so much about my eggs cooking up. I mean, we get multiple tries, right? We're all broken and risk everything to mix with a potential pair, but sometimes, we flop. Sometimes at the end of the date or the years of dating, all that we can do is lay flat on the plate and give up. If relationships worked out every time, life would be boring because we'd all be paired up with whichever little eggy we happened to be seated next to in our squeaky styrofoam beds. (No, how about cardboard? Let's be eco-friendly here; I try.) Hmm... "Life, friends, is boring!" ...so Berryman seems to think.

I'm glad for second-chances. I'm glad for falling apart and feeling like I'm nearly expired and hoping that someday I'll be cooked up tight in that French burrito of an omelette. Sorry, Julia, but it's no 30-second venture, and it takes more than two trys. Even if I'm not that hungry and I end up only cooking one egg, all swirled up within myself, as long as I've made it, knowing when to break and when to bounce lightly in the bubbling heat of butter, I can admit that Julia wasn't too far off, even if breakfast isn't quite what I thought it would be. 

Never apologize.