Sexy: Sweaters, New Year's, & the Color Yellow

 I look good in yellow. I’m not one for appearances, and I really hate shopping, but I look good in yellow. It’s the one color that I look for when I have to buy a top. After my first day at this new job, I learned (unsurprisingly) that my wardrobe is hardly suitable for even a week in the real professional world, especially when the dress code requires long-sleeves. A co-worker recommended H&M as an inexpensive place for quality clothes. I’d never been, but Derek loved to get clothes there. As a result, I have an H&M sweater, but I left it in Pennsylvania. I left a lot there.

Before I left last year, I decided that I needed to entirely sort my life’s possessions. As I went through my clothes, packing only the cool clothes for Arizona heat (of course I had to re-pack when my compass shifted to true North), I made a pile of donate-able clothes—old ones that just didn’t fit, things I never wore but kept around just in case an occasion popped up. At the time, my closet was full of many of Derek’s clothes, mostly sweaters and tops and a few pairs of sweatpants: all of the comfy clothes. I fought with myself for a long time about it before finally deciding to donate them too. I thought I needed to get rid of them all. I put them in a trash bag, and they sat there in the bathroom for weeks. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ripped open the bag and grabbed just a few sweaters—the ones I wore the most, the ones that kept Derek close in some way: I remembered helping him into them and the way he would say, “You aren’t going to break me, Nat” when I would cautiously bend his stiff arms through the sleeves.

I wore one of them in the days following Christmas. I wore it four days in a row. A friend commented that she liked it. Even though we had just had a conversation about polite ways to respond when someone likes an outfit, like “Oh, I got this at ___,”  I couldn’t admit that it was his. Sometimes the little things are so very difficult.

So the sweater kept me warm the whole drive South last weekend.  I drove from Seattle to Grass Valley, GV to Joshua Tree National Park, Joshua Tree to Mesa.

Joshua Tree National Park, California

I felt rejuvenated: sunglasses, mittens, Vampire Weekend blaring through the speakers, a pack of Marlboros on the passenger seat. I thought about Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, “Sexy” and how the little boy character defines “sexy” as loving someone you do not know. Turn that someone into something and you have me: I love the road. I love seeing what I have not seen before, filling in the voids like in old video games where you had to get so far to see further into the game’s layout.

I felt sexy driving into unknown territory, through mountains I have never seen and places I have never been. I felt sexy with greasy hair covered by the hat I crocheted last winter, with my mittens worn so thin that both thumbs have holes, with a fading cigarette between two fingers with calloused tips and short, crescent-less nails. I felt sexy with a smile and an old sweater.

I drove in the dark a lot. On the drive down, I spent the second day wondering if the sun would ever show up. Maybe it had called in sick. Fog hung around the hills like a puppet’s string, hovering and guiding life below through its misty, gray stage. Come ten-thirty, it nearly felt like dawn, the heavy curtain lifted to release a solo spotlight in the East. I sighed relief: day would come. I had been driving since 3:30am and was beginning to wonder what daylight felt like. The previous day, I learned that here in the North, the sun tends not to break the clouds until around ten o’clock, and by ten-thirty, it seems to reach its peak, never rising further, despite the tug of the hour hand’s insistence on afternoon.

Tejon Ranch, California

On the drive home, an equally strange fog hit me in Eastern Oregon. Driving through the hills mid-afternoon, I approached a warning: Dense Fog Ahead. Low Visibility. Reduce Speed. Ha! It’s midday. They must have forgotten to turn the sign off; surely there isn’t fog now. I drove another mile. No fog. Suddenly, as I peaked another rising bend, it happened. Like a penetrable wall, I soon found myself surrounded by white as if I had driven to some level of heaven. I could barely see twenty feet in front of me. To my left and my right, my windows were nothing but this blank lack of color (--or is it all color? I never remember). 

Those two days were full of silence. I found myself driving for hours without radio or music, just listening to the silence of the road, the silence of god. Utah, Idaho, and Oregon seemed so open, so vacant. At Bryce Canyon the first day, the silence was so overpowering that I could hear my own blood rushing through my skull. Maybe it was the high altitude. Maybe it was the cold; snow does have a way of insulating silence. I wondered what it would be like to be deaf. Would it always be so quiet tied up with the heavy pressure of life’s force?

Bryce Canyon, Utah

As I made my way along the snow-crunched trail, I looked up at the hoodoos that walled me in. I heard a quick whir, like a hummingbird passing by my ear or a plane quickly spanning the sky above me. Before I could connect the thought to the sound, I saw the stone hit beside me with such force that it dug two inches deep into the compressed snow. Another foot to the left and that surely would have stopped the loud rushing in my head. And to think I was worried about mountain lions.

I guess it just wouldn’t be a roadtrip without the stinging crack of rocks. I’m beginning to collect them as chips in my windshield. I now have three: one that came with the car when I bought it, one from my drive through Texas last year, and now one from Idaho, sent soaring towards my face, making me jump as if the glass weren’t there: like walking into a sliding door and leaving a small crack in the glass instead of the smudge of skin.

Somewhere along I-84 in Eastern Oregon

The trip was necessary. It was great to visit my family: all of my Arizona-folk now leading new lives. I wondered how I will fit in now—my little cousin knowing my sister but looking at me like a stranger; my sister living a new, married life that I cannot yet understand; my friend turning away from years of comradery. Furthermore, how I will shape my new life, this new year. For starters, I am twenty-one years old, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I slept through New Year’s.

I remember December 31, 2010. Dawnna, Derek, and I went out for dinner in Monroeville. We went to the Moose afterwards for socializing and drinks. They had decorations and sparkling red top hats. I put one on Derek. As I put him to bed that night, the beginning of our last year, I laughed at the ring of glitter lining his forehead. I washed that red glitter out of his hair for weeks.

December 31, 2011: Yuma, California. I spent the evening playing cornhole with family and friends and lighting paper lanterns and watching the instant burst of Christmas trees in a bonfire. I was lonely, and everything was so different.

This year, I didn’t have a chance to feel lonely or empty. After a large, traditional meal of sauerkraut, veggie dogs, and homemade mashed potatoes (sometimes I think we just might make it as adults; look, Mom, we cooked our own meal together; we used to fight over who would do what, but on our own, we fell naturally into roles—I peeled the potatoes while K chopped, and we boiled up our servings, hers with butter, mine without), Katlin and I napped on adjacent couches, lightly dozing through the clock’s welcome into a new calendar. At midnight, Jake yelled, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” I briefly sat up and mumbled, “hpy neu yr” as my heavy body sunk into the deep, happy sleep of a full belly.

Painted Sky, Arizona

For once, though, this journey turned out not to be so much about the destination: there really wasn’t even one--it's kind of like New Year's: you don't go into it thinking of when the year will be over but rather what you will do along the way. This trip, I needed the drive. I needed the time alone. I needed the time to hear nothing, to think nothing, to be nothing. I needed to find pleasure in a good song and a cigarette and laugh at my own stupidity as I talked to myself for hours. I needed to go away from Seattle because it made me realize that, on my way back, I was returning home. I needed to feel sexy, to love what I do not know.

Snoqualmie Pass, Washington

Tonight I stood in a dressing room in H&M. I found a great yellow blazer for $10. I tried it on. I couldn’t even button it. It was the largest size they had. Sometimes I wonder if I am cut out for this life: the city, a professional lifestyle, worrying about what I look like. I do look great in yellow, but sometimes, I feel sexier in a familiar grey, quarter-zip sweater driving in a circle around the state of Nevada.