A Tramp, A Broad

when you hope for something that does not exist?

So I guess this is a little bit late. But it’s a result of thoughts that have been accumulating in my head all week.

Sometimes I wonder about people in relationships. Not ALL people in relationships- just a few groups, in specific.

I realize that I am basing everything that I am about to say around Facebook, and that might sound trite to some. But really, it’s becoming one of the biggest ways that we communicate with one another, as well as the way in which we create a perceived persona. It allows us to control, to a certain extent, how the rest of our world views us.

So when I log into Facebook, and I see people who post entire albums of photos of themselves and their significant other, cuddling, close-faced, kissing; I wonder.  And for the record, I’m not talking about a vacation album, or a wedding album. When I look at my feed, and I see boyfriends and girlfriends, or husbands and wives, writing on one another’s walls, expressing their undying love, affection, and devotion for one another; I wonder. When Valentine’s Day rolls around, and my daily scroll is inundated with photos of flowers, and chocolates, and jewelry, posted with captions like, “I’m the luckiest girl in the world for having such a sweet boyfriend”; I wonder.

You may think that this is starting down the road of an, “I’m single, and completely annoyed and miserable with the fact that anyone is remotely happy in their current relationship” kind of rant. But it’s not. I promise. I’m single by choice, the same way that it is a choice to be in a relationship.

This kind of cyber-PDA doesn’t disgust me because I’m single. It disgusts me because it seems to me that there is this sort of epidemic of people who feel that unless everyone else in the world knows that they are in a relationship, and how fucking great it is, that somehow, it doesn’t count, or isn’t worth it. 

I don’t want to be anti-Valentine’s day, because I can’t think of anything more worthy of celebration than love. But all Valentine’s Day has done, is taken something that is inherently beautiful, to the heart- not the eye, and turned it into something ugly with the expectation and necessity of something tangible. If your boyfriend, doesn’t buy you flowers; he doesn’t love you. If there isn’t a thing to declare to the world that it is real, and it exists, then according to Cupid; it does not exist.

Maybe love isn’t what we think it is. Maybe it isn’t what I think it is. Maybe it’s just a moment. A glance between two strangers, in two cars, stuck in traffic next to each other. Maybe it is giving someone else the last whole potato chip, when the rest of the bottom of the bag is crumbs. Maybe it’s the way that a dog picks which bush to pee on.

But the way I see it is: Love is enough. Love can stand on its own. It doesn’t need an ambassador.  Sometimes, it is just quiet and tacit. And sometimes it is so good you want to shout from the rooftops, but not because of who is around to hear you scream it.

feed me the red tomatoes
from a porcelain plate. ripe,
dripping from the vine, they are ready
to be plucked, salted,
and devoured.

play me a song with strings.
one that lingers on the lips and unfolds
the notes, wrinkled letters
tied with twine, beneath an unslept bed
in a farther room.

let me wear my ruffled nightgown.
if only for a clumsy minute
before we pare the peel, and bare,
in desperation, the body to better feel
the arrogant night air.

carry me down the road of night
sounds. brimming before it runs
out, and we find ourselves near
that sweet stream. wash my hair 
as we sink into the river bed.

The afternoon on my penultimate day in Paris, Tommy and I met, grabbed a bottle of cheap white wine and headed to the right bank of the Seine. Strikingly tall, blonde banged, and fashionably dressed, his presence commands attention wherever he goes, but with a refreshing subtlety. He’s gay, but not in the flamboyant flashy way that really dills my pickle. Just the normal speaking voice, well-mannered, wonderfully disarming kind of way.

When we finished the bottle, we decided to have another, and then lather, rinse, repeat. And we sat and drank and talked until what ragged sun had shown it’s face, hid beneath the squat skyline. Some French policemen came and said what we assumed meant that we needed to leave. Somewhere in there, we discovered that despite all of our obvious differences, we shared a lot of things in common: we’ve both had dalliances with kind-of-famous men, love BBQ, and most notably, we both grew up within unique communities, and both left them in a semi-dramatic fashion.

Tommy grew up on an Indian Reservation in California, with a tribe leader for a father. I grew up in a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, with a father who was an elder. He left to attend college in Brooklyn at 18. I was ex-communicated from my church at 20, as much by force as by choice. For both of us, within our respective communities, we had an overwhelming feeling that if we continued on the path that was being laid out for us; there would be no deviation. We might as well go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning 50 years later, because we already knew what the entire in-between would be. So we changed the path.

“Don’t you feel sometimes like you could just go on forever in ever different direction? Like you just need something to push up against that will push back?” Tommy asked me.

The elder’s meetings in which I was forced to discuss my not-so-sordid sexual behavior in front of my father, the nights I spent listening to my mother plead and sob, the public humiliation of having your sins made known to an the entire congregation of people; all of those things were awful. But all of it was short-lived in comparison to the aftermath. Being raised into a life where someone is telling you every step of the way what to do and what not to do, leaving it behind for precisely that reason, and then getting up everyday and thinking, “What am I doing with my life? Someone please just tell me what I am supposed to do.” is so much farther-reaching. You start to look for things that give you some structure, boundaries, things to reign you in and contain you. Something to push up against. So much of what I have done in the last five years has been in search of things that would give me that feeling, because I had no idea how to function without it.

Obviously, structure is necessary, but if that’s the only purpose something serves, well, that’s just not good enough.

I’d like to think that after a month of writing, and by default, self-reflection, that I’d take all of my new accumulated awareness, and change for the better.  But we are undoubtedly creatures of habit. And when those habits are ingrained in you from birth, they are extra hard to break.

I told a friend right before I made it, that this move was going to be my time of letting go. Not just letting go of that old pair of sandals that sit in the bottom of my closet or that pair of jeans I will never fit into again. Letting go of old feelings, unproductive habits, dependency to my place of origin, expectations of where I thought my life would be by now, doubts about my capabilities, and lingering insecurities. Basically, letting go of myself and so many things that I have been pushing up against for so long. Things that have served no other purpose, other than to reign me in, but in doing so have also held me back from finding more meaningful structure. Now, I’ve been in a new city, for less than two weeks, and I’m already searching for things to push up against, and in all the wrong places.

So, here’s to reasserting my initial intention. I was foolish to think it would happen the moment my car crossed the Illinois / Indiana border. But honestly, it was a good start. So, here’s to building on that momentum. Here’s to my year of letting go.

It is Friday night. I am in Paris. I feel like I should be out carousing, flirting, being young, drinking too much champagne, meeting boys, and making bad decisions, (in that order), but I ate too many tapas and drank too much sangria. So I am at my flat, in bed. I tried to rent The Lincoln Lawyer, but my internet is slow and it’s taking forever to download.

So I’m listening to music, sitting at some bittersweet in-between, not occupied enough to keep my mind from racing, but not bored or tired enough to fall asleep either.  I am not drunk enough to forget, but not sober enough to remember.

This is the first time that I’ve felt like I’m at home here. Or not home, but back in the states. I feel like I’m in hotel room, anywhere. Just had a big dinner, enough wine so that I can sleep soundly in a strange bed, but not so much that I’ll be too hungover for clients in the morning.  So full, but empty. Alone but not lonely.  Content but not complacent. Living in the moment, but waiting on something just over the crease of the horizon.

I was working in Michigan one day, and I walked into a bar called The In-Between. Somewhere in the course of our conversation that revolved around me selling gloves, and garbage bags, and plastic cutlery; I told the owner that I really liked the name of his bar. I asked him if it was because he was equi-distant between White Pigeon and Sturgis.  He said sort of. But that really it was because, all of us, are always in the in-between. In-between work and home, in-between lunch and dinner, in-between relationships, in-between happy and sad, in-between beers, in-between moments. It was the most poetic sales call I’ve ever made.  

I’ve been trying to avoid museums, gift shops, tourist traps, clubs with too much techno, taking too many photos, falling in love, and pretty much everything else that you are supposed to do here. But all of those things are inevitable. I had to see some paintings for an assignment. I had to buy an umbrella. There’s a reason that people go to the Eiffel Tower- it’s beautiful. Techno is as pervasive as the smell of cheese in my fridge. Photos fill in the blanks alcohol creates. Living in Paris for a month is as dangerous in terms of falling in love, as having an affair with a man.

I’m not ready to leave. I wouldn’t be happy if I stayed. I will go home. That is inevitable too. Weeks in Indiana, weekends in Illinois, that long stretch of route 65 strobed in the red blinking lights of all those fucking windmills like an extraterrestrial proving ground splayed out between. I will return to my job, satisfied to be a part of something that means something to me, but always questioning whether I should be doing something that means more. Always grasping at the present, like a child trying to wrap his fingers around the water flowing from the faucet, but eyes fixed on some indeterminable point in the distance. 

And you. You are always there. Somewhere in-between my feet grazing the sidewalk cracks and my head nuzzling the cold side of the pillow. Somewhere rushing between my fingers. Somewhere buried in my palm lines.  A reason to try and remember as much as to give up and forget.