fifty/fifty

50/50 was the first movie I saw after Derek died. We went to the theatre. It had been about two weeks since the day. We had a great evening; the kind where, two weeks after your best friend died, you feel guilty that you’re out of the house having fun with friends.

In Aesthetics class my sophomore year of college, we watched Iphigenia. We were studying catharsis and art, and we talked about how film is often one such expression where you can experience a range of renewing emotions. What it really boils down to is bawling until your eyes are empty and holding onto that feeling of wholeness that lingers until your face is dry & feels tight when you try to make a face.

Last night was our company Christmas party. I wore the dress that I bought and wore for Derek’s funeral. It was the first time I’d worn it since. I told myself that it was just a dress. Just material. What does it matter? Then I added the final touch of the dark shell necklace he got me in high school. A just because gift.

Please excuse my tenses. I cannot write about Derek permanently in either present or past.

So I’ve been thinking about Derek. Not that I don’t think about him anymore; just that some days it’s more than others. And some less. I think that’s a good thing.

My roommate is out of town for the next two weeks. It feels surreal—I have the place to myself for two weeks. Just me and the dogs…and the turtle…and the fish. I’ve been sort of counting down for weeks, just looking forward to having my own space. I’ve still got two months to go, but these weeks are a taste. I can do anything. I can lie on the couch for hours if I can’t muster up the motivation to be productive. I can listen to the radio whenever. I can walk around in my pajamas at any hour without fear of someone’s boyfriend coming in.

And all of this is how I found myself sitting on the couch with Pickle licking the saltiness off my cheeks.

“I just want it to be over. I’m so fucking tired of being sick,” the main character, Adam, cries. I wonder if Derek felt that. I felt that. I wasn’t even sick. I felt it when Derek was in the hospital—I wanted it to be there months from then where we would be home and happy again, like it used to be. When that didn’t happen, and Derek died, I wanted the grief to be over. I wanted to be past missing him and feeling empty. And now I’m here. And I think this is that “over”, but it still doesn’t feel over, and I’m just fucking tired.

The movie is set in Seattle. The filmmakers do a terrible job making it look like the city, offering scenes of the Space Needle that couldn’t possibly exist with the corresponding streets in the film. When I first saw the movie, I knew so little of Seattle: rain, grey, Grey’s Anatomy. That’s it. I didn’t even think Frasier (hadn’t seen it yet) or hadn’t thought of it as a place to visit (until a few months later), and I certainly never imagined that one year later, I’d be living there. Here.

The winter has been mild so far, but the looming grey weights heavy & worries within me that I won’t keep happy through the rain. Mostly I wonder how to keep moving forward knowing the life that was while not understanding how it fits into the life that is while upholding my usual anxiety around the life that will be.

Typical Seattle December. Chance of rain: 50/50.

for good.

As I walked to the bus coming home from work, six o’clock chimed from some distant building. I imagined that it would transport me to another time, like they do in the movies. I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them, there I was, standing on the sidewalk on the way to the bus.

For one of the first time, I am openly saying it: I am sad. I am stuck. There is no reason for this sadness, but here it is. I am pushing through, forcing myself to do things like eat and work and write. I’m trying not to be rude or closed off. I’m not sure how I’m doing.

Everyone tells me to trust Jesus. Rest in Jesus. I’m certainly trying, but it’s hard to see the big picture when there is a tightness in my chest that makes breathing and moving feel like great efforts.

Clear your mind then. But meditation, I find, is particularly difficult for a writer. I am constantly writing in my head, even when a lot of it never sees paper.

I recently watched an episode of Boy Meets World where Cory and Eric are arguing and questioning their relationship as brothers. Their mother tells them that everything works out for good. “Do you really believe that?” Cory asks. “Yes, I do.”

I don’t want to be a statistic, but statistics say that the holidays are when people can be the most depressed. Honestly, I haven’t even thought about the holidays because they seem a bit unreal this year. The past two years, I’ve spent the holidays mourning—wondering why they didn’t look the same as they had the rest of my life, wondering why Derek wasn’t there. This year, I look back to last, my first in Washington, my first away from family, yet spent with really good friends. The forecast this year calls for the same. Only I feel like I should grieve less being another year removed form Derek.

I’ve been looking at pictures of him. It just doesn’t seem real. I am questioning everything I ever knew. Or though I knew. How does my life keep going yet his does not?

I’m not sure yet if my personality is a blessing or a curse. It sure seems to be a bit of both because I don’t think I could ever truly be depressed like the people on the Zoloft commercials. I have that type-A personality that says you must get shit done no matter how shitty you feel. So I do. (Hence the eating and working and writing.) So my personality is a blessing because I still have my job and my health, but it is a curse because maintaining those things feels like I am Atlas only without about as much muscle strength as a praying mantis. I don’t know if you know this, but bugs squash pretty easily.

Right after Derek died, I didn’t quit all of the things I wanted to. Of course, I can’t credit any of that semester to myself—a select few really strong people carried me along. Looking back now, I can hardly remember a lot of the details; all I know is that I somehow made it through, as if there was a wall of Saran Wrap somewhere between then and now, and I’ve broken that barrier. I think sometimes, the pieces still stick to my skin and my face and try to suffocate me, but I know I can break them again. It’s just that when it’s covering your eyes and your nose and your mouth and you can’t breathe, and you can’t think straight, it feels like it must go on forever, and there’s no way to get rid of it.

I wonder if I’ll look back on this span and forget the details but just be glad to have made it through. I wonder if I tend to imagine my whole life like that—one big box of Saran Wrap unfolding.

I think about that when I see really happy people. How are they so happy? Why aren’t I so happy? I take happiness for granted because, let’s be honest, I am happy a lot; I just think too much and trip myself, thinking that I only deserve some thin version of cellophane.

The other day, I wrote about seeing Mount Rainier at sunrise. The next day, Pickle and I were out even earlier. I looked out to where the mountain usually is and saw only darkness. But a few moments later, I looked to that same spot and saw the silhouette of a mountain with a soft glow behind it, barely discerning its wavy peaks from the disintegrating dark. I thought about how soon that soft glow would be a full day’s light. I thought about how it hadn’t reached us yet, but to my folks back in PA, the morning was mature: how maybe it was cloudy there, and they couldn’t even see the sun, how maybe people in the Midwest were still enjoying a bright colorful sky that was coming my way. I was suddenly reminded of the curve of the earth and fell into a short period of what I can only call an existential crisis.

I tried to move on with the day. A normal Sunday: go to band, go to church, go to lunch. I couldn’t do it. As I showered, I just kept thinking about that curve—how did I get so small? This big chunk of ground is spinning so slow that I can’t tell and that it takes twenty-four hours to turn around once, yet so fast that I can’t tell and that my feet stay fully grounded. But I barely stand an awkward five feet, nine inches tall against the great heights and depths here. I couldn’t even be seen from an airplane.

I sat down in the shower. I turned the water on extra hot and sat down, letting my skin turn pink in the spots that hit. Pickle stuck her head past the shower curtain and licked my hand. She flinched as the water hit the curtain, thinking it was getting her. Ears back and sad eyes on, she understood—it’s all too big to grasp.

This is actually really embarrassing to write about because I mean, how often do you think about the curve of the earth? How small you are? How temporary this all is?

So here I am, trying just to fathom the fact that I exist somehow and for some reason and that God has some plan to make my atoms click into a smiling young woman and actually mean that smile and recognize that our hope lies, not in this spinning ball.

I imagine the globe is a basketball. When you learn to spin a basketball on one finger, you drop it a lot. You learn to control it, though—how to balance just right to keep it spinning until it loses momentum. I picture God spinning it on one finger. A quick flick of his wrist and it’s off, going going, but when it falls because the ball has stopped, that’s the end. Your life is the length of one balance of a spinning basketball on God’s fingertip.

What hope is there in that? The uncertainty of the length of time; the nauseous churn around and around. No, the hope is that someone has got it in control. And us? We’re just little mites holding on with all we’ve got and trusting that someone knows when it will stop and how it will stop and what it will feel like and who we’ll see when we’re no longer surrounded by everything we thought we knew.

Maybe the six o’clock chime didn’t take me somewhere else but right back to some sanity—the realization that I can’t fool time or place, and that no matter how hard I hope, there are some things I can’t change. And I think that’s a good thing. That dizzy feels you get when you spin around too quickly happens for a reason: to make you slow down.

I rush a lot. Like now, I want to rush out of this sadness, mostly because I want to think I have no reason to be sad. Of course there is reason to be sad, to mourn, to grieve. But there is also plenty of reason to be happy, to sing with joy, to smile. I just wish I could tell that to the tightness in my chest or to the empty feeling in my bones.

There is a line in one of my top ten favorite books, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, that I think describes this feeling perfectly, “So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”  

place: EastvWest

I hope that I never lose the wonder of place.

Going back to Pennsylvania was a great reminder of that. While I lived there, it was beautiful: the seasons, the rolling hills. When I moved to Seattle, particularly my current apartment, I was in shock: This is where we live! I would exclaim on a near-daily basis, amazed by the views, the water, the mountains—things we don’t quite have in Pennsylvania.

This morning, Pickle and I walked out to end of the walking bridge. Mount Rainier was glowing pink and yellow with the sun not yet peaked over the snow. We stood in awe for a moment, trying to take it in. Of course I wished I had my camera, but sometimes, I think not being able to visually document a moment adds just a tinge more appreciation.

This hasn’t quite been the experience of the West I’ve dreamt of my whole life. My ideal West was living in the desert as some hip artist, admiring the vast landscapes, being cool and charismatic in the sun. Instead, I find myself in the center of a city, bustling and busy, and certainly not charismatic. Or hip. I’m still the same uptight young person who wears the same jeans and shirt for three days in a row. Maybe there is something to that.

I like to pretend that I’m down-to-earth or that I have my priorities straight. I’m probably not and probably don’t.

I guess I just thought that the West would be vast and feel so open. Sure, I’ve had that experience driving up and down the state of California, but I somehow thought it would be my everyday.

The East was once described to me as “claustrophobic”. I could see it then; I lived there. You were always enclosed by hills and trees. But city buildings enclose you on a much closer and seemingly taller level. Everything is within walking or biking distance. Even work is only fifteen miles away. So going back to Pennsylvania felt like a return to the open spaces: fields, two lane highways that stretch forever, and naked trees that let you see right through their branches to the next horizon. Driving five miles is like walking one in the city.

So life in the West isn’t what I expected, mostly because I didn’t end up in the West I intended—I went North instead of South. My compass is a little off, and the topography is much changed, and now that we’re in winter, the sun brings more cold than warm.

But the awe is still there.

The strangest part about Pennsylvania, was looking at the horizon in a 360 and not seeing the mountains, the pointy, snowy ones that at first felt like a closed in box but now feel like the walls to my home.

work chronicles

I was going to document this as “life without a car,” but then I remembered that even when I had a car, I took the bus to work.

I’ve learned that relying on busses means a lot of running, which I guess is fine because, other than walking Pickle, it’s pretty much my only source of exercise.

Yesterday morning, I ran to catch the bus. Our first bus ran off the track, but when the driver when to fix it, he smashed the line into the truck behind us, meaning he then had to file an accident report. Only about five blocks from my stop, I got out. Then I looked at the time. Three minutes until my bus was due to arrive in the tunnel.

I started the run. Around the bend, my ankle turned, but I had to keep going. I arrived in the tunnel just as my bus was pulling up to the stop. Panting, I got on and made it to work on time.

When I get off the bus, I always make a quick stop at Blazing Bagels. They sell day-old muffins for $0.50, which I find quite a deal, even if they aren’t vegan (one of those exception instances where my wallet rules my diet).

The muffin man knows me. We’re on a first-name basis, even if most of the time, he calls me ‘love’. When I walked in the door this morning, there were three people in front of me. I stretched to look over their heads for the basket of day-olds: one left. Don’t take that muffin, I thought on repeat in my head. When the muffin man saw me, he quickly swooped up the muffin and walked up to register. I walked around the folks in front of me and dropped my two quarters into his hand.

“One left, love!” He knows that I get disappointed when they run out of day-olds before I get there; when they don’t have any, I dish out $1.79 for a bagel to be polite.

I smiled, took the muffin and wished him a happy Friday. The whole exchange took about 47 seconds, and I walked out of the door with a lovely chocolate muffin.

There are a lot of little shops like that near the transit center. A few blocks away, there’s Café Habits, which I’ve never been to, but yesterday as I walked to catch the bus home (an early evening at just 4:10!), I heard someone call my name from the café door. One of my co-workers was waiting for his coffee order. We stood and chatted until his coffee was ready. I then continued my trek to the bus, praying I wouldn’t miss it.

There’s a big intersection before the transit center. After the two traffic lights, a pedestrian light comes on; there’s no crosswalk, but the light say, “Crosswalk is on for all crossings,” and all of us walkers scramble in zig-zags to get to our appropriate corners of the center.

I was waiting for that light. I saw my bus sitting at the curb, so I prepped for the dash, getting into a runner’s stance, knees slightly bent, one leg in front of the other. When the light turned, I bolted. Unfortunately, dress shoes don’t fare well for running. Halfway across the street, my shoe fell off. Arms flailing, I scattered back for it. My one sock cold against the brick road. Slipping it back on and stepping on the heel, I scrambled on. The folks waiting for another bus made obvious comments like, “You almost lost a shoe!”

“Gotta catch my bus!” I huffed and kept scrambling, arms still swinging at my sides like a ‘20s dancer only much less elegant. Twenty feet from the bus, it pulled away from the curb. I slowed my pace in a disappointed puff of a sigh. Those ten minutes until the next bus really make a difference when it’s the first night you’ve left the office before six all week, and you’ve got over an hour’s commute ahead of you.

Magically, as I pivoted to stand next to the bus stop, another one pulled up. I got on, and it departed. No harm, no foul. Glad to be seated, out of the cold, and on my way home, a happy sigh left me to my commute novel.

By the time I get downtown, I never feel like catching another bus. Of course I have no choice if I want to get home. Sometimes it feels like the rush of catching a bus is the most excitement the day will bring. Sometimes I miss it, and that’s okay. It’s a lesson in patience for sure, but in Paulo Coelho’s Valkyrie, he writes about how we all have an angel. When things happen, like we forget where we put our keys (or we miss the bus), it’s because our angel is looking out for us: there’s a reason we were meant to be delayed against our plans.

Coelho’s guide in the desert says that when those pauses happen, he likes to take an extra second to try to figure out what it is his angel is trying to tell him.

I think of this during all of the rush and rest of commuting. Somehow my angel always gets me where I need to be. Sometimes, it’s just to grab the last muffin in the morning.

inspired by trial&error

Everytime I get a new writer’s magazine, I feel a burst of inspiration. I begin to think that I can be a writer. The funny thing is, most of the time, the best pleasure comes from reading about writing and imagining that life or from the dream of studying writing. Let’s face it: writing itself is painful.

The articles always inspire me. I can do this. I like to look at the ads, calling out the best schools for low residencies, for nonfiction, for poetry, for place, for travel, for conferences, for workshops. I check out the locations: could I really see myself living in Connecticut? Probably not.

I found a program on Whidbey Island of all places: a low-residency nonfiction workshop. I began to plan out my imaginary life, writing when I get home, mailing in my work, attending two-week long workshops. Could I really do that? I want to learn. I struggle when I’m not actually in a classroom. I like someone to tell me what I do not know; I don’t like to figure it out by trial and error.

But I guess that’s what a lot of adult life is. Like how I’m learning that having a roommate in a studio apartment probably wasn’t the best idea. Like how I’m learning that committing to a 9-month study at church wasn’t in good timing right now and how I don’t have enough of a foundation to learn the content on my own (I need a teacher, not a bunch of articles).

I’m in a funny place. I’m looking for new apartments, and while I’m really ready to live alone, I panic that maybe I’m not. Furthermore, I find myself feeling stuck with this church class. Sometimes it feels like I do it just to keep up with everyone else because I am afraid that I might miss out on some gem. Sometimes I feel like I have to stick with it because I dropped out of grad school, so if I drop out of the class, how do I think I could ever finish an MFA?

I’m trying to wait things out—get a better feel for what the hell is going on right now. Frankly, most of the time I have no clue. I feel caught in one of those rolling cumulus clouds that turns darker before a storm. You never notice the grey getting deeper until it overtakes the sky.

I’m not really sure what the darkness is right now. Sometimes it comes in random pieces of sadness that keep me from doing anything but lying on the couch wondering what it matters if I don’t write that paper or don’t ever publish a book. Sometimes it’s the dissatisfaction of writing the paper and pressing send, only to reflect that I’m walking away from it with nothing but a sinking feeling of vain effort. Sometimes it’s the worry that I’m not spending enough time with my dog.

I think that muses like to play with my strings. They turn and twist the knobs, keeping me just in tune enough to get by yet just off pitch enough to sound sour.

I think that’s my problem in general—that I’m too general. Here I am trying to be everybody, trying to be a painter, a writer, a potter, a student, a worker, a musician…a whatever. I’m not really good at any of it, but I sure can bullshit a lot. I’ve tried to narrow down, but it always leaves me with a hole—feeling like I need to paint again or need to throw some clay sometime in the predictable future so that I can be whoever it is I think I am—the unchanging devotions of self.

I think that this season is a big life-defining time.

Having a puppy is doing some of that work: I can’t paint with her around because, well, she wants everything I have, and paint + dogs don’t mix very well, and dog hair paintings aren’t really what I had in mind.

I like to think that if she calms down in five or seven years, I’ll be able to stand at a desk with paint all around me, and she’ll lie on the floor watching but not wanting.

That’s the trouble with this time. Everything that could happen isn’t right now, and that’s hard to accept. There’s a waiting period. There’s the need to gather funds. There’s the need to organize what I currently have. There’s the need to plan with no “launch date” in site.

My prayer during this season is that I can be okay with the waiting and the planning and not try to make it all happen right now or even next year: I need the patience to put the back-work into it now, so that when the opportunity comes, I can do it. So instead of wishing away this unproductive time, I can be just as productive, productive with the important set-up stuff—putting together a writing portfolio, gathering ceramics equipment, saving for studio space and studying for the GRE.

There’s no time to waste. I don’t have many jelly beans left.