It might sound selfish,
To ask you not to leave me.
But I’ll ask anyways.
I’ll ask because we’re not done yet. Because we’ve so much more to see.
Or maybe just because I can’t write this little note without loving you so fiercely.
So don’t leave. Stay awhile. Stay forever.
Or just until you’re an old woman and I can help you into your favorite blue nightie. Tuck you quietly into bed. Kiss your cheek and send you off to sleep.
The way you did me every night when first we met.
23 Over 23
New York brings out the lonely girl in me.
And I wonder, with every anonymous man who makes a comment and disappears, what he’d say if he knew…
Knew it’s Blondie’s birthday tomorrow and she doesn’t know what to do.
Baby blue.
Because two sides tear her at times like this – that universal human hunger for acknowledgment. The hope to be seen. And that now instinctual drive to disappear.
Disappear into a city where one is at once seen and made invisible.
I don’t want them to talk to me. Don’t want to be ignored either. Want to be special. Seen for what I am and not this shell I become on the crowded City streets.
This reflection – all legs, back, shoulder strap is not at all the timid child I feel fidgeting around inside this steely frame.
Here’s something: All women walk with shoulders slumped when viewed from a certain angle.
It’s easier to be alone than left. Over and again.
I guess I could simply say I don’t part ways well.
And if I’ve got one thing going for me it’s a mother who never left. Her presence tempered always by a fear she might forever.
Here’s something: spiny armed pre-teens touch each other messily on the corner of 67th and Columbus. They do this with artificial nonchalance, their movements meant to belie the shocks and sparks each second of skin affects.
I find myself thinking recently of how we’re all just animals and isn’t that so strange?
Two men carry their baby. Hold balloons and a bag from Zaabars. Look calm, clean. Connected. I wish I was that baby. Wish I could say I knew. What it feels like to be so held. So safe.
I am straddling two lives. The past and present. Waiting, I suppose, for the next stage to arrive.
I am always waiting.
A week before my birthday she packed her things and left.
I do not blame her for doing this.
Nor do I really understand what it meant for her to move.
In my memory it’s less the momentum of courage it must have been for her and more a coagulation of images in my mind. Binding together to reach towards some meaning.
A wide ramp stretching from the porch to a moving van.
Broad bodied men lifting finished wooden bureaus. Wrapping them carefully, like sleeping children, into quilted blankets.
Her curls bouncing as she carries a cardboard box down the hill, leaning backwards behind its weight.
Did I climb into the car and ride away with her? Or stay behind to watch him walk into his study and shut the door. The latter, I believe.
And then I was all alone.
And then it was the weekend and a new woman arrived. Long bodied and brunette with a daughter who danced in our garden. Somersaulted on our trampoline. I said I wanted to see my mother. I slammed the door.
And after that, after that brief uprising and the rage it incurred, I never did so again. My mutinous days were over. Perfection melded with self protection. And I was all alone.
I’ve never wanted to remember this before. And now that try to, I realize why. The indistinct recollections my effort dredges up affect a despondent pain in the core of me.
A hunger.
An ache so wide it could consume, from the inside out, the person I’ve tried to become. Despite everything.
Despite the nights he sat on the sofa, head in his hands, and sobbed.
Despite the pain I forged because I never did.
MAYBE they’re all right.
For years I’ve been told I’ll never settle.
Settle for one person. I am:
Too complicated. Too adventurous and with too much to do before I die.
MAYBE I am.
My mommy disagrees. Says I’m:
committed, steadfast, serious.
And MAYBE I am that as well but not yet to another person.
MAYBE not ever but certainly not yet over that fear of opening the door and letting him inside me, only to have him turn and want to leave once he’s arrived.
I wonder sometimes when I’ll come to want what everyone else does. I wonder sometimes if I already do. Want that Other, elusive and all encompassing.
But till I figure all that out, I’ll love the maybes instead. Throw myself into delicate play aimed at their unpacking. And for that, I’ve got these words:
Gertrude Stein. The communication of Intuition: “that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”
Carole Maso. “To imagine story as a blooming flower or a series of blossomings. To change the narrative drive to better mimic one’s own realities, drives.”
And the spaces they recall.
The yellow cones shaped by head light and fog that shone out in front of me each night I drove home from the darkroom. Each night and for one year.
How could I foresee that one year would make me who I am?
The year as an independent space. That year, and each one before it has amounted to something on its own before propping up the space that follows. Building upon the place that proceeded, and forming this person. This never ending project.
And how could she foresee that boy she barely knew would return four years later? Gun her down in the campus bookstore.
It’s like a novel, my mother said when I came to her, crying. Bleary eyed, despondent, over the opportunities lost. The importance of time. The importance now, more than ever, to put down these revisions. To rewrite and reshape the meaning of these words.
I say this selfishly. Not because I knew the girl but because she could be me.
This will not be you.
How do you know?
Because the stars. Because we charted you at birth. Chartered your course.
And that is a comforting thought. That the constellations told her. Cassiopeia said. I was meant to write. Meant to write this out.
And MAYBE if that’s all I’m ever meant to do, I’ll be alright with an ending when it comes.
