Excerpt

“But you never even hesitated like you might not want to tell me.”

“Why, Cody?” I yelled. “Wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t you already know the answer then? You knew or you wouldn’t have asked!” I stared at him desperately, and he stared back through me, unmoving. He wanted me to protect him, but it was me he needed protection from. I looked to the ground. The train, speeding along, jolted against the side of the tracks. I could see his body bump with the sudden motion, then settle back into the seat, all in just one second. I looked up. He closed his eyes.

There could have been a dozen other people on that train. I don’t know. All I could see was Cody. And in my mind, both Peyton, and me. All terribly alone together. The silence seemed endless. I’d never been so lost in a silence in all my life. It simply hung there in the air between us. Unyielding, without any hope at all. I would have died to fill that silence.

“Don’t you see the way that I look at you?” He asked then. More sadly than angry this time. “Can’t you tell that I think your smile, your eyes are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen? That you…you being happy, is all that’s required for my own happiness?” I remained focused on the floor beneath us. I knew he was going for my heart now. No longer in the hope of winning it. But now, without knowing, he was reaching out to break it. To even the unsettled score.

“You, Amerie. That’s all that I need. And what you are, everything that you are, has never been enough for him. For whatever reason, under what superficial categories you’re falling terribly short, I’ll never know. But I know, and you know, Amerie…you know that he doesn’t love you. So go ahead then, and judge yourself based on that. On the lack of whatever you wish you could be to suit him. But remember, while you’re adding up all of the places and ways in which you’ve fallen terribly, terribly short… remember that your very flawed, undeserving self, was always, much more than enough for me.”

I looked at him, and his eyes filled with tears. Tears of truly, desperate heartbreak. I knew that heartbreak. I looked back to the floor, yet unable to speak. What I realized then, was that if given a gun, or a promise each...our choices would be quite different. I would kill Cody, and he would marry me. Neither of us would even think twice.

[from Gorgeous]

Tribute

I had to tell her. Not because she could solve the problem, because without describing the whole ordeal to you, let me say that this particular problem was essentially un-solvable. But I needed to tell her anyway, because it felt wrong not to.

So I explained the entire situation. We hadn't had an actual conversation in weeks, and certainly not about something positive in much longer than that. Our lives have gotten sadly complicated recently, moreso probably than either of us ever anticipated. She listened intently, as I knew she would, and when the story was over, she paused.

"You don't need me to tell you what to do," she said then, without judgement. "You need to walk away from the whole thing. But then again, that's probably easy for me to say from out here. Still-- it's your only solution." Again, as she always is... she was right. And for some reason, hearing what I already knew, coming from her, allowed me to genuinely know it. And I was able to exhale.

This is the way our friendship has always been. We have survived all sorts of unpleasantries ... as in any friendship. We've seen the ugliest things about each other. We lived together, so when I say ugliest... you can only imagine what I must mean. The worst cases of jealousy, boy crazy, depression, anxiety, bingeing, puking, drinking, fits, fights, family crisis, love and loss that any two people can live through in two years. We did it all together. And whatever was formed in the air between us those days and nights, during the drunk times, the happiest times, the worst times...has turned into a friendship that hundreds of miles and a few years apart has not been able to challenge.

This is a girl, worlds smarter than I am and just as busy, who reads every word I have ever written... and considers each and every one. Good or bad...I am accepted and never judged. Right or wrong, these things I say are applied to her as the truth of who I am, and thus, who we are as friends. How we have grown as people, and where we came to get here.

I am so lucky, because she doesn't even know that she is these things. She doesn't realize that she enables me to be a pain in the ass almost constantly, and doesn't hold it against me. "It's who you are," she'll say. And that is simply that. She allows me to say, "I told you so," and even says it for me sometimes. "I know, you told me. I can't believe it." And I laugh. And then so does she.

I'll end the gushing here. Except to say that I'm lucky a dozen times over to have 12 of the greatest close friends the world could possibly have offered me. She is one, though, who currently deserves a tribute all her own. Thanks, then... for being the best. Not just to me, I know, because these characteristics that I so admire and appreciate in you, are those things which make you the girl that a million people know and love. We're all lucky.
Thanks for the last few months, the last few years, and all of the years to come. It is going to get better, easier, and more normal for us all some day. I'm not sure if you need to hear that-- but I'd like to believe it for myself. And in the mean time... I'm here too. Hopefully even half of the friend to you, that you have been to me.



"You’re being a psycho,” I mentioned one day in passing.
“I know, Jen.” Was all she said, which was good enough for me.
[from, Through the Glass]

"Those were the best days of my life"

A 20-40 Look @ Hindsight

I spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. I think we all do. Hindsight is one of the great phenomena of human-nature. So great, in fact, that one of our most popular catch-phrases in the english language is hind-sight-themed:

"Hindsight," they say, "is twenty-twenty."

I believed this all of my life. A product, perhaps, of my mother using it constantly to demonstrate having to accept the consequences of a bad decision I'd made.

"I wish I hadn't done that," I'd say.

"Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty," she would reply. And I would agree. It seemed so inevitable, so true.

As I am growing up, I am finding however, that hindsight is not always accurate. The mind, it seems, has a habit of coloring the past to force it to look how we choose to remember it. Usually, this choice is subconcious, I think. At least it is for me.

I'm constantly wishing for presence of mind. In any sticky, unusual situation I find myself thinking... My God if I could just think this through. If I could just see the situation with some clarity, surely I'd be able to understand it, and thus...do the right thing. Dating, as usual, is a good point of reference for this thinking.

Whenever a relationship is getting complicated, or going wrong... whenever I think, "Why in the HELL is this so hard? What am I possibly missing..." it turns out (once I'm able to examine the problems after the fact) that the person was totally wrong for me. Or I for them. Sometimes, as is more often the case than not, I didn't even really like them to begin with. Now why isn't that something I could bring myself to understand at the time? It isn't to say that I'm not paying attention... because let's face it... you all know there's nothing I like better than analyzing myself in relation to the world around me. Still-- I fight what I will someday know to be true. All in the hopes of that (sometimes colored) future understanding.

There's absolutely no point to this except to say that it is maddening. I would like, just once, to understand something or my reactions to it, without the benefit of hindsight. (Altered perception of it or not.)

Is hindsight really twenty-twenty? Or are we concocting "understanding" of ourselves in an effort to better our future endeavors? (Self preservation? A defense mechanism?) Either way, I'm going to continue to anticipate the benefits of hindsight, and a little presence of mind. Especially, perhaps, in the times that need a little coloring.

An Anniversary Worth Celebrating

I opened my eyes, blinking out the sunlight flooding through the window. Where was I?

I glanced down my body, still fully clothed in last night's outfit, shoes included. When I moved, plastic crunched beneath me. A mattress, still it its wrapping, in a vacant room. My suitcase lay open on the floor next to me. I was definitely still drunk, if not just badly hungover. Memories started to dawn on me from the night before, when immediately I figured it out...

I was in New York!

I'd left Charlotte yesterday! The movers wouldn't be here until Tuesday. I'd bought the bed, and taken all five of my new roommates to my new coworker's bar in a getting-to-know-you effort.

I reached out for my cell phone, patting the bed around my legs, but no phone. I sat up, and met with a painful rushing in my head. My phone wasn't on the floor either. I stumbled over to my suitcase and tore through it, hoping in my drunken stupor I'd simply tossed it somewhere. No phone.

I began to realize that after the coat-check on our way out of the bar, I didn't remember much at all. How had we gotten home? It didn't seem as complicated as getting there. We'd taken a subway and a bus and then walked for what seemed like forever. No. There was no way I'd done that drunk. I left with Nan, I think. One of the two girls. The guys had separated earlier, and perhaps Baller stayed behind? Was there a cab?

More important was my presently missing cell phone. I was supposed to be at Penn Station at eleven to pick up DB, my then "bf" so to speak, who was coming in from Philadelphia to spend the weekend with me. I had no idea what time it was...as my phone was also my only clock. I checked my coat pockets, the floor, the windowsill...again, there wasn't much going on in here. It was gone. I started to panic. How would I find him in the train station?! We would be lost from each other and he would have to get back on a train and go home. I didn't know his number, because I don't know anyone's numbers anymore. A product of the cell-phones themselves. I was becomming hysterical. There had to be a clock in this apartment somewhere. I went into the living room, which was completely bare, minus a television and two lawn chairs. I took the heels off, and padded down the hallway into the kitchen. The microwave said 930. Thank God. I hadn't already missed him.

I showered, changed and navigated my way to Penn Station. It hadn't donned on me for some reason that I knew what time his train was coming in and from where... so I went to the gate and waited. When he came up the stairs, I'd never been so happy to see anyone in my life. As he hugged me, I rattled on about the missing phone, the crazy night, the strange roommates. He gave me his phone to call my parents and assured me I'd be ok. My mother was less than pleased with the story of my trials.

"You can't just get drunk and galavant around the city, Jennifer," she huffed. "You're going to get raped and killed if you don't start paying attention. You're lucky your cell phone is all that you lost." I had this coming. I gave her DB's number and told her he'd be here for the next two days. She could call him if she needed me, and I'd get a new phone in the morning. We bought coffees and got onto the subway.

How could I have been so careless? As the events of the night unfolded for me (through stories from the roommates and my own sobering memories) I realized I'd puked in a cab and kissed my coworker in the coat check at the bar. My phone was probably one of those two places. We spent the day trying to find him, to see if he'd found the phone. Eventually, that afternoon, the cab driver showed up at the bar with the phone, claiming that I owed him $100 on account of the puke. The coworker agreed, and told him to bring the phone inside. Apparently then, he threw $20 at the extortionist and threw him out the door. A nice gesture for someone I'd yet to spend a single day of work with.

That night, DB and I sat at dinner, and laughed about the ordeal.

"You'll be OK," he said. "You're going to get settled, and you'll learn how to be more careful." I wasn't as sure, but I smiled at his confidence in me. I realized, for the first time, that I had no idea what I was doing. The decisions leading up to the move had all happened so quickly, that I had no time at all to consider them. I was simply coming here. And so I came. And in a matter of 12hours I was already screwing it up. And then, also for the first time, I began to feel afraid.

That day was one year ago, now. This morning I woke up in the same room, now painted, decorated and furnished. So much has happened since that first day. So much has changed.

I never imagined that I'd last a year here...in this apartment, in this job. This anniversary marks the longest relationship I've ever had. The most serious commitments I've ever maintained. I've stayed in a city, in a lease, and in this office for an entire year. And for the first time in a very long time, I'm proud of myself. Picking up and moving is not the scary, impressive thing. It's so automatic, so based on necessity and what has to get done, that you don't have time to be afraid of it. There isn't an opportunity to examine what exactly it is that you're doing.

But living with that decision, through the bad times, and the scary fucked up things that can happen to you as a result of it... that's what is impressive. Because then, during the good times, of which there have been MANY for me this year, you get to smile to yourself. You get to sit back and realize that your life is better because you made it that way. Because of your choices, your life is exactly how you want it to be.

And that, is something worth celebrating.

Blizzard is a Buzz Word

This is going to be really quick. Because to be honest, I'm fucking exhausted.

First of all, I just got back from a boxing class @ my gym, which was called simply, "boxing." I think a more apropos name would have been "You'll never make it out of this class alive, or at very best, absent the function of your limbs." The super-frustrating part of it all, was that the 300lb bald, tattooed man who was screaming at our class full of "pansy bitches" to get on the floor and do another two minutes of squat-thrusts, could probably not have survived a single squat-thrust if his very life depended upon it. Jerk.

Well any way, I guess it's been a trying day all around. I just need to comment briefly on the snow... since everyone else is talking about nothing else.

I was minding my own business yesterday, lying in my bed watching Spinal Tap while eating a Tuna Salad lunch kit (lunchables for grownups I like to think) when my phone rang. My father, ecstatic, was on the other line.

"Are you snowed in??" He squealed, as if it were a Christmas morn of his childhood. I craned my neck toward the window behind me.

"Yeah. There's snow," I said. Apparently I wasn't sufficiently reactionary.

"Is there 26 inches of snow?" He pressed on. He needed the details. CNN was reporting from Central Park and he had an insider in the trenches. Where the hell was his front-line commentary?!

"I don't know, Dad," I sighed. "It looks more like 6 inches to me. But who knows. I'd subtract twenty or so inches from their high estimate." I wanted to remind him that News is television too...and they're out for as many ratings as Grey's Anatomy and the Bachelor. He was deflated.

I never turned on the television yesterday, or today for that matter, but this "blizzard" is all anyone can think about. People rolled into work today in jeans and sweatshirts. Snow boots were everywhere, Agencies were closed, people weren't leaving their apartments. It's a state of total panic!

I will venture to guess that on the high end, midtown might have gotten something NEAR two feet when all was said and done. Maybe 15-20inches. But the sidewalks were shoveled, the streets plowed, and power uninterrupted. What in God's name is so frightening about this? It must be my stint @ Gannon which has me jaded toward all things snow-related. Between November and April, this was the least amount of snow we'd see. People sliding around the sidewalks was a commonplace. Salt-stained cuffs lined the bottom of every pair of our pants. Waist-deep snow? Get to class. Slippery, ice-covered sidewalks of death? Most girls navigated such terrain in heels, with a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Please. New Yorkers can deal with EVERYTHING! I can't believe this "blizzard" has everyone in such a panic.

I have to blame the media. I have a feeling that minus the UNINTERRUPTED NEWS COVERAGE OF THE BLIZZARD OF 2006... we might all be able to deal with the realization of some snowfall on our own. Possibly even without requiring a sick day. Or sedation.

Yes. We got dumped on. But for those of you who survived a few Gannon winters on lake Erie... these people haven't seen anything.

Nite!

I Hate the Pottery Barn and Maybe That's OK

I missed the 4:30 bus.

I missed it by seven minutes, and in fact, it was still in Port Authority when I got to the gate. But the doors were locked. I'd missed it. And I cried.

Before the baby died, I went months, even more than a year at a time without crying. Now, I'm lucky to make it through the week without tears of some sort.

Anyway, there was no reason to be crying. I'd hours ago missed the only bus that would have gotten me to Philadelphia in time for TT's shower. Now it was just a matter of how late I'd be. The 5o'clock came and I climbed on. I instantly fell asleep, which lets me know I'm not doing well. I do most of my thinking and writing en'route. So when I'm too tired to ponder, It's obvious that I'm feeling out of sorts. I noticed, when I woke up, just outside of Philadelphia, that I felt terribly anxious. Showers of any kind make me nervous, due mostly to the overload of women present. Too much talk of things I am uncomfortable talking about. Which is exactly what awaited me at this one.

She was opening presents when I arrived. We hugged, and took a picture, and I gave her a vase from the Pottery Barn which I wrapped in the cab from the bus station. It was one of a hundred items from the Pottery Barn. It looked, in fact, like the Pottery Barn catalogue had thrown up on the living room floor. I maneuvered to an inconspicuous spot in the back of the room and poured a cup of coffee. From back there, I could not only hear and see TT's reactions to her gifts, but everyone else's as well.

"Oh I have one of those. It sticks when you bake a bundt cake, so a little Pam is always helpful."
Or..
"Oh she'll use that all of the time. My husband loves the casserole I found in that book. Oh! The homemaker's guide to entertaining! Tara you've got to share some of the secrets!"
Or..
"You can never have enough tableware." Said with illustrated intensity.

It was becoming hard to breathe. I drank my coffee and poured another. Where was the wine at this shower? Upon canvassing the room, I noticed that everyone in it was pregnant, married, or engaged. Everyone. I felt a little dizzy.

The presents were done, and people began to leave. I smiled weakly and entertained weird questions about New York from people who didn't know my name. Her family and I loaded the cars with all of her TABLEWARE and went to her perfect apartment to unpack.

The thing about TT, is that she doesn't know she's perfect. She's perfect on purpose, so you'd think she'd be aware of it...but if pressed, she could point out a hundred and one things about her life that she finds to be somehow less than. But she is. Her clothes are perfect. Her apartment is perfect. Her dog...perfect. Perfect job, new car, beautiful things, new handbags, shoes, coats all of the time... And as I sat amidst all of this perfection, I started to wonder if I'd ever be anything more than a mess.

We talked about the wedding, the honeymoon, plans for kids, plans for a house. "I'd rather talk about you!" She cooed. "What's been going on?" I looked at her blankly.

I started to notice then, and continued to notice for the rest of the weekend, that people from my former lives have adopted a look for me somewhere on the axis of sympathy and confusion. They seem sad for me, when I tell them that all I do is work and spend all of my time with clients and coworkers and go to the gym at 5am. That I drink and eat brunch and lug my laundry to the laundromat and sleep until 2pm on Sundays. They don't know what to say anymore when the answer to "so...do you have a boyfriend?" is STILL no. It's always been no, yet as they've moved on, and have begun to settle...it seems strange to people that I have not. Only this weekend, did it begin to seem strange to me, too.

IN Pottery Barn on Saturday afternoon, the suffocating feeling came back when she and her Mom were haggling registry items with a nine month pregnant Sales Associate. I was looking at utensils that I didn't understand, used to make things I will never make. Again--dizzy. Somewhere in the home-furnishings section I found a slate bench, surrounded by over-sized wall mirrors, and plopped down. I scrolled through my phone book, but almost no one could have appreciated my despair at that moment.

I sighed, realizing that I used to work in that mall. Just down the hall from where I sat. I looked to the side, and saw myself hunched against the wall on this slate bench. In black pants, a black rain coat, black boots and huge black sunglasses covering the overly dilated, frightened black pupils. What was wrong with me? I was crawling out of my skin.

We met Tree for dinner that night, and luckily the two of them had plenty of wedding notes to compare. I drank a bucket-sized latte and thought about other things. But my mind kept wandering to Cabrini. How close my life had come to being completely different. Had I stayed, I may never have gotten to New York. I may never have fallen the way I fell in Charlotte, and thus never realized what in God's name it was that I wanted. I may have been living in a perfect apartment. I may even have had a perfect dog, and boyfriend, and car. And I may have been perfectly miserable.

We drove through Cabrini before I left on Sunday, and much as it is in my mind, it seemed completely frozen in time. I don't visit it very often in my thoughts...mostly because the uncomfortable truth is that I could never understand why I left. But it's starting to become clearer to me... I'm starting to see the difference between me....and there.

She hugged me as she dropped me off to visit with Dandrea...who are expecting baby DANDIE in June. More talk of babies and weddings and honeymoons...theirs and other people's. They gave me a similar look. And I smiled similarly weakly in return. I got onto the bus and called my mom. Again...the unexpected tears. I sobbed for an hour, and begged her to tell me why I'm so different from all of my friends. Why the "right things" aren't important to me. Why I'm so afraid of settling...why I'm suddenly so afraid of everything. She assured me that I was simply operating with different motives, and on an entirely different timetable than my friends. And I knew she was right. I got the, "you're doing what makes YOU happy," lecture, which was much appreciated as I'd lost sight of it somewhere between New York and the Pottery Barn. When I hung up, I fell asleep immediately again.

When I woke up, just outside of Manhattan, the skyline was the first thing that I saw. I smiled widely and a weight expelled from my mind. I was happy to be home...as I am always happy to be home. Valerie called me then, and we made Superbowl plans for that night. I spent the evening in a messy, tiny apartment, drinking champagne out of the bottle with a few of my New York friends, and a few total strangers. It was a perfect Superbowl, and the perfect end to a lovely, albeit trying weekend.

Please don't mistake my anxiety for disloyalty. I love my friends, all of them. And I am truly happy for their happiness where these weddings are concerned. All of them. But I hope they don't mind, if they don't happen to notice my smile on the outside. It may be covered with huge sunglasses and a Mimosa in my hand.

And maybe that is why they love me in return. And maybe that is ok.