Weary

There are days that begin with malaise and trepidation, but you fling off the bleakness with something you want to call determination, but that is more likely fury.  And you make bold, healthful start-of-the-day decisions which you hope will sweep you up in a tidal wave of manufactured optimism that you pray will somehow morph magically into sincere optimism.  You make a fucking smoothie for breakfast--you put goddamn spinach and chia seeds in it, for fuck's sake. You make a plan to go to the gym with Casper and Dion.  It will be the first time Casper has ever been to childcare that isn't at a grandparent's house.  You give him a brave smile and stride down to the pool without looking back, hoping to impart confidence versus the pained reticence you exude most days lately.  Dion works out for half an hour and then brings Casper down to the pool.  You hop from the big chilly pool to the little warm one to play with your lovely family.  Casper smiles and splashes and climbs into the gutter to walk the perimeter like it's a tightrope while singing Popeye The Sailor Man.  You shower up and head home to make lunch.  Suddenly everything hurts and feels dead-tired-- your eyeballs, your gut, the crown of your head.  Dion takes over the meal preparation as you strain to engage with Casper, hoping a little food will make the awful go away.  It does not.  It builds and turns solid, a force you cannot bargain with.  Nap time is an eternity away.  You make pointless attempts to hasten sleep for the both of you.  At one point you doze off for a few minutes, waking suddenly to find that Casper has climbed atop a file cabinet and has, impressively, peeled off a long strip of decorative wallpaper.  You scoop him up and wash the paint chips from his hands.  Next you turn on cartoons to babysit your child, but he wants your attention.  "Play cars, mama? Read book?"  He's listing any number of things you could and should be doing with him, but cannot as the pain has spread into crevices of your head and body you didn't know existed.  Still you pull him into your lap and read him stories until his head lolls warmly against your chest and his breath grows rhythmic.  When you put him down you feel relieved and lonely.  Your loneliness is as acute as your inability to be around humans--friend, family, or stranger--because you cannot summon anything at all--not a smile, or a bland remark about the weather, or talk of some future plan.  There is no forecasting anything from minute to minute--your outlook, mood, ambition, pain, energy--are all subject to change at unpredictable intervals and you don't care to explain this to anyone.  It's tiresome.  And you're very tired, of all of it.  You often think to yourself, if I'm here for any reason in particular it's to document the minutiae of human suffering without bringing a shred of wisdom or hope into the discussion.  And you call that honesty.  But your anger and emotional contradictions don't make you special.  They just are.   

Brain on the Fritz

Sleep is a state as mysterious as it is crucial to survival, to life.  And when something so imperative to basic health and functioning becomes elusive, or at times disappears altogether for several days on end, it no longer seems like some magical, whimsical wonderland of dreams and gentle rest.  Its mystery can no longer be romanticized.  It must be solved, and quickly.  Because living with little to no sleep is not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.  Your faculties don't just become sluggish.  Your body doesn't just feel exhausted.  These things happen, but something diametrically opposed to these things happens at the very same time.  Your brain becomes a jumble of fried, anxious synapses, leaping from haggard hopelessness to the highest peak of terror--on par with being lunged at by a grizzly bear, every 90 seconds or so.  And while you lumber and scramble through your days, alternating between the pendulum of dead-tired and adrenaline-surging panic, each night ahead looms like your worst nightmare--only you'd gladly tackle your worst nightmare if you could only do so while ensconced in glorious, restorative sleep.  Nightmares--real ones--are a piece of cake, an absolute dream!--compared to the death march of unending wakefulness. 

And of course you'll have sought out every possible idea and treatment for this--as your doctors will minimize-- "very common problem."  You will have started with good old melatonin, 5 mgs at first, jumping to 10mg a month later, and then to 15mg.  You will reluctantly see your doctor for an ambien prescription to help get your sleep back on track, and then to use very occasionally, on particularly bad nights.  But the nights are consistently bad and you begin to rely on the pills.  A couple of months later the pills stop working and you decide to stop taking them and force natural sleep to resume, as if the initial problem was a pill addiction and not mind-deadening insomnia.  To avoid withdrawal symptoms you taper down to half doses for a week before stopping completely.  Sleep is non-existent or dodgey at best during this time.  Often you won't fall asleep before 4 or 5 a.m. and when Casper rouses you at 6 in the morning it is all you can do to not sob torrentially in front of him.  But you bring him downstairs and make him breakfast and stare vacantly at the face of this boy you love more than life itself, but who you cannot imagine caring for today, much less for many years, day in and day out, if this situation doesn't right itself. 

You'll try every sleep aid and supplement and tea on the market.  You'll try acupuncture, hypnosis, reiki, and meditation.  You'll tackle things from a western medicine front at the same time.  You'll see a sleep specialist and go for a sleep study, which will yield nothing helpful, only that you have a difficult time reaching and maintaining REM sleep.  No solutions are offered.  You will get autonomic nervous system testing, which will come back more or less normal.  You will have a cardiologist order a 48 hour holter monitor which will record a smattering of palpitations, but nothing the doctor is too concerned about.  You will call your fiancé, who works third shift driving a semi, at 3:00 in the morning, weeping, and he'll tell you to try to relax and that you can sleep when he gets home to watch your son.  He will encourage you to nap with him and with Casper, but you've tried this and your brain isn't capable of sleeping at any time.  There's no pulling a fast one on it and grabbing an hour during the day.  Your brain is on to you and it's having none of your desperate attempts at sleep, day or night.  Your terror and paranoia begin to mount due to months of sleep deprivation until you're quite certain you will kill yourself.  It seems the only viable option to this unrelenting horror show your life had become.  It takes all your strength to admit yourself to the in-patient psych ward, as one miniscule scrap of functioning brain matter convinces you that there might be help out there and that your family might miss you a great deal, should you off yourself.  The experience in-patient will prove to be the exact opposite of helpful; it is in fact quite damaging. You'll be put on medication that will still not help you sleep, but only trudge in a drug addled stupor through the sad halls with the other sad, drugged people.  You will cry for the majority of the time you're there--for yourself and for your son who must miss you a great deal and for the worry you're causing your family and for the sad stories you're forced to hear from the other patients during group therapy.  You'll become quite certain that this is the worst, most damaging and counter-productive place for a mentally ill person to be.  When you get out 5 days later, you experience equal parts relief and dread, as the original problem has not been solved, only compounded by ineffective, harmful medication.  You begin the shaky, gut-wrenchingly anxious process of detoxing yourself from the pointless poisons and try to find new ways to manage lack of sleep. 

You will finally wind up at the ER (there've been several stints there in the past 6 months, in the interest of honesty, where you were treated like a nuisance and a 100% pure mental patient), and you convince the doctor to order a CT scan.  When it comes back abnormal you will rejoice and mourn in equal measure.  There is something wrong.  I knew it.  Why wouldn't anyone listen to me?  Why wouldn't anyone believe me?  Why would severe debilitating insomnia and anxiety, not precipitated by any acute trauma, descend upon a person so suddenly and worsen so rapidly? 

There are still no answers.  I must wait 3 weeks for a neurosurgery consult and 4 weeks to see a neurologist.  I'm left with Googled scholarly articles about colloid cysts and way too much medication to induce sleep.  But at this point Dion says, "Just drug yourself to sleep until you can see the neurologist."  So this once very health-conscious girl who shuddered at consuming a non-organic apple is now knocking back 10 mg of ambien and 1 mg of clonazepam, along with my natural stuff--melatonin, L-theanine, and magnesium--to lure sleep to my buzzing, itching, screaming brain.  And I'm awaiting an answer, a plan.  I'm praying that brain surgery can give me back my mind, my life.  I'm praying for Tracy to come back.  Because I was never terribly kind to her.  I never really gave her the credit she deserved.  But I promise that if the real Tracy gets to return, I'll do everything I can to make sure she knows how great she is, and that she's brave and kind and funny and an all-around good person.  This is my promise to me.  Come back, Tracy.  I miss you.

Grappling

Yesterday evening I asked Dion to lie down with me and he slipped into bed like some warm and hilarious lifeline, and I clung to him as such.  I needed to be held and to talk about whatever decided to pop into my bubbling-over mind.  I said, "When I say things like: 'The surgery will either cure my insomnia or I'll die, and either way I'll get to sleep' I don't really mean it.  I don't want to die.  I don't want to leave you or Casper. I'm just talking tough because I'm afraid."  And he said, "I know" with that affectionate you're-not-fooling-anybody tone as he pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head.  "You're a cute little thing," he added, and that must have felt unexpected and very important to hear just then.  Bewildered by every last thing about life and love I queried with total surprise: "I am???" and started to cry.  And when I stopped crying we talked about Donald Trump for a while, which felt like a natural segue, as the countdown to that garish, vitriolic reality television personality being the actual full-fledged Commander-in-Chief feels exactly as surreal and damaging and terrifying as having slept only a smattering of hours in some ragged fever dream for months on end and then learning there's an unwelcome mass sitting smugly in the exact center of your brain-- daring you to think about it, daring you not to, daring you to try to get rid of it, daring you to let it stay put and just see what happens.    

Kindergarten: From The Trenches

As a little kid I was enthusiastic, creative, sensitive, and had a flare for the dramatic.  I loved to tell stories and put on one-girl shows for my family.  I cried and laughed easily.  I loved to play outside.  I loved animals.  I loved kids.  I loved adults.  I just plain loved.  When I entered kindergarten at the Catholic school up the street from my home it was with these beautiful qualities in tow.  I was ready to learn and play and make friends.  I was excited.  My excitement wasn't for a moment tempered by fear or worry or anything of the sort; it was complete and unadulterated.  But the messages I began to receive from my kindergarten teacher started to chip away at my joy and confidence.  My humor and playfulness were met with rueful glares.  My sensitivity was met with irritation or outright anger.  I began to downplay the vibrant parts of my personality; I began to second-guess my every kid-instinct toward happiness and fun.  I'd never before encountered an adult who found me so distasteful, so I went to work to remedy things.  I observed other children whom she was kinder toward--kids who were quieter and more serious.  I strove in earnest to emulate them.  It wasn't easy.  And I slipped up again and again, forever stunned by the teacher's vitriolic response to innocuous things.  During a sing-along one day, I decided to chime in with my opera-voice, a falsetto with a quavering vibrato that I'd been working on since hearing such a voice on the radio.  I expected to be praised for my extraordinary adult-like tone.  Instead she stopped playing the piano and lurched to face the kids seated behind her, shrilling, "Who is singing like that?!!"  The question was so livid and accusatory I didn't dare volunteer that I was the culprit.

Another time when the all girls were on a scheduled bathroom break, I found myself to be the first one done and decided to have a tiny bit of fun.  I turned off the light switch in the bathroom for about four seconds.  There were surprised gasps and a couple of "Heys!" before the I turned the light back on.  I went back to class wondering what my fellow classmates would say about the miniature ordeal.  It turned out that the event generated so much buzz that the teacher found out about it and refused to let any of the kids have their snacks until the perpetrator confessed.  I was shocked by this turn of events and promptly decided to take my prank to the grave.  After 10 minutes or so a short brunette girl raised her hand and confessed.  My jaw dropped.  She was yelled at and made to sit in the corner with no snack while the rest of us ate.  When the teacher wasn't looking I snuck over to her and asked her if she really did it.  She said, "No, I was just hungry and wanted it to be over we could eat our snacks."  I nodded seriously as I covertly slid half a pouch of fruit snacks into her hand.  And although I felt horrible that she took the rap for me, I wasn't about to confess and incur the wrath of teacher. 

The incident in kindergarten that wounded me most greatly came later.  I had been working my hardest to appease the teacher and get her to like me.  Once I sat silently through an entire mass without squirming or whispering, just hoping she'd notice.  It turned out that she did notice, and she rewarded me with a miniature Reese's peanut butter cup.  I popped it into my mouth with all the sacred reverence of a communion wafer, congratulating myself at having finally won her over.  So contrasted with this experience, the next day was doubly heart-breaking.  It was near Easter and my classmates and I were seated around the little art tables coloring pictures of bunnies.  I sat next to the girl in class who was most liked and praised by the teacher, hoping to observe and replicate her coloring technique so I could also be praised.  I noticed the girl used soft pressure with her crayon, and that she had chosen gray for the fur.  I followed suit.  She finished before I was done, so I rushed a bit so that I could get in line right behind her to have the teacher judge our work.  Even with rushing a bit at the end I thought my bunny looked really good.  I was proud of my work.  I stood behind the teacher's pet and listened as she heaped compliment upon compliment upon her.  I couldn't wait to hear the same words directed at me, at my work.  As I stepped up to her desk I saw her look at the picture carefully.  Then she said, "Which stamp do you think I'm going to give you?"  Sitting on the desk were the teachers two oft-used ink stamps--one was of a smiley face and the other was of a sad, crying face.  These stamps would only seem cruel and bizarre when I was older.  I shyly pointed to the happy face stamp.  She swiftly stamped the crying face upon my paper.  I stood there dazed and blinking until she told me to go sit down so the next kid in line could get his stamp.  Instead of sitting down I walked toward the coat room to try to get a handle on the grief that was about to overwhelm me.  I decided not to cry this time; I opted instead for anger as I crumpled my artwork into a ball and stuffed it into my backpack.  As I emerged from the coat room the teacher was right there asking where I'd put my picture.  "In my backpack," I said, trying to keep the tears at bay.  "Let me see it," she demanded, walking briskly into the coat room and waiting as I pulled out my crushed art.  She then proceeded to browbeat me for destroying my school work, the very work she had mercilessly deemed awful just a minute prior. 

I couldn't do anything right, it seemed.  I couldn't even quietly express my hurt at having tried my best and failed abysmally nonetheless.  There was quite literally nothing I could do that she didn't consider sloppy or annoying or bad or wrong in some way.  My existence was a catch-22.  Since no amount of good behavior or effort was ever going to endear me to this teacher in any lasting or meaningful way, and since I still had blinding hurt searing through my veins, I did the only thing that felt possible.  I fled.  I grabbed my backpack and shoved past the teacher, out the classroom door, down the staircase, and out into the bright and chill of early spring.  My feet pounded the pavement hard as I sprinted home, bursting in the door with sobs that ravaged my little five year old body.  I was met by a very surprised mom who held me and smoothed out my crumpled picture and told me that she thought it was excellent.  It garnered a place on the refrigerator and everything.

This was when I first learned that adults could be cruel.  But it would take a few more years before I began to understand that not every adult warrants respect, and that not everything every adult says about you is right or true.  It would take a great deal more time before I developed the audacity to challenge authority when I found it unjust.  For most of us it will take a lifetime to heal the early wounds that robbed us of our beautiful, big-hearted innocence.       

Fall By the Wayside

Freshman year in high school loomed strangely.  It felt less like a new chapter and more like a semicolon.  We were changing buildings, but keeping the bulk of our peers and pecking order.  But I had long since relinquished any and all hope of rising to the popular elite and I was quite happy with my little group of friends.  As long as I had my hilarious best friend by my side I was quite certain I could survive the whole ordeal. 

When my best friend began distancing herself from me not long after the year began it felt like a sucker punch.  At first I thought I was imagining it.  When it became clear that she had established another friendship that was taking up a lot of her time I told myself that I just needed to make an effort and that the three of us could all be great friends in time.  I wasn't wild about sharing my best friend, but I was a reasonable person.  It took me a couple of months before I fully grasped the truth of it; she had chosen her new friend, not as an addition, but as a replacement. 

Being subtly edged out of a friendship in high school is a demoralizing experience to say the least.  You sort of go through all the stages of grief--denial, bargaining etc--in total isolation.  The person you used to talk to about such things is now the person you need to talk about.  And talking to other friends about the issue seemed like shining a spotlight on what a loser you must be for having had someone you had been close to suddenly drop you.  So I went to work strengthening old friendships and building new ones, pretending that the dissolution of my best friend and I had been a mutual thing, and not the least bit devastating.     

But before I fully accepted the demise of our friendship, there was a month or so when I thought maybe I could win her back or become part of a friendship trio.  I insinuated myself into their plans as casually as possible, pretending I didn't notice the strain in their voices as they politely let me tag along.  One day, I managed to shuck and jive my way into a sleepover invitation at the new friend's house.  I decided I'd play to my strengths--being funny and making hilarious prank phone calls, something old best friend and I had really used to enjoy.  But while my old prank phone call shtick had been goofy and absurdist, my work that night veered unintentionally toward the cruel.  I suggested we call a boy in our class who was already an automatic punchline for every asshole in our class.  I chose someone who was having a far worse time than I navigating the hellscape of high school.  And while I did it under duress of trying to win back a friend who had clearly moved on, I have a very hard time forgiving myself for it to this day.  The phone call was brief, but I remember it in excruciating detail. 

The boy's father answered and told me his son was in bed.  It was after 11:00 pm, so I'd probably awoken him as well.  He sounded groggy, but very kind.  I apologized for calling so late and asked him to tell his son that "Lisa" had called.  The dad suddenly sounded very happy as he promised to tell him first thing in the morning.  For some unconscionable reason I asked the dad if his son got a lot of calls from girls.  "Oh, not that many," he said, diplomatically.  When the phone call was over I played it off with a laugh, but I felt like sobbing.  This boy who I'd seen teased mercilessly by shitheads at school was going to wake up to his dad giving him the exciting news that Lisa had called.  And he might wonder for a split second if there really was a girl named Lisa who liked him.  But then he'd probably realize that some shitty person was just making a joke of him even after school hours.  He'd be in the gut-wrenching position of breaking his dad's heart and saying, "Actually, Pops, not only is there not a friend or girlfriend calling to legitimately talk to me, but those horrible kids from school are now terrorizing me at home." 

After that sleepover I went quietly into the night and set old best friend free to be whoever she wanted.  I had caught a glimpse of myself that was so ugly I never wanted to see it again as long as I lived.  And if I'd become so desperate as to be mean-spirited to someone who was already bullied I didn't want to see what other pathetic lengths I might go to.

After I finally let my old friend go I was in the uncomfortable position of trying to ascertain why she had jumped ship.  I looked back on our 3 years of every weekend built-in sleepovers at alternating houses.  I remembered discovering Mystery Science Theater 3000 with her late one night and proclaiming it the best show in the history of the world.  I remember feeling honored and very responsible when her mom asked me to take care of their pets when they went on vacation, and of once being invited to come up north with them.  I remember for some reason applying Lee Press-On Nails on the car ride up to their trailer on a lake, and then having a challenging time playing in the woods.  I remember watching at least 200 rented movies with her that we got from the store her mom worked at.  I remember going to a pet store to buy dog treats for various neighborhood dogs we had noticed were left outside a lot and of bringing the surprised animals a snack a few times.  I remember browsing the old Kohl's Department store in town and both buying eye pillows....to rejuvenate our tired 11 year old eyes, I guess.  I remember laughing hysterically with her about everything.

I didn't remember anything bad or anything I had done wrong.  Later I began to think that my sarcasm and disdain for the popular crowd might have been a touch too negative and that she wished to enter high school with a more glass-is-half-full outlook.  But I never really knew for sure.

Adulthood continues to usher in more questions than answers, much to my chagrin, but I know for certain that spending time with people who steadfastly love you as you continue to grow and evolve and stumble and collapse and rise again on this never-ending journey of being human is the only thing that matters.   


 
           

 
          

Abiding

Notice him at work on the other side of the office in an unadorned cubicle.  Yours is cluttered with taped up Onion headlines & a lot of pictures of you with your giant dog.  There are many, many coffee ring stains overlapping across your desk like a Venn diagram. 

Notice he is friendly when he needs to speak with co-workers, but that he keeps to himself.  His walk is brisk and his hands are sunk deep into his pockets when he arrives and leaves work each day.  He eats alone, you are pretty sure.  You have a goofy little lunch group that laughs louder than the people at surrounding tables in the work cafeteria.  You and your friends take turns telling inappropriate jokes & sharing stories of the annoying habits of your cubicle neighbors & wondering aloud how much longer you can stand to work there.

Notice his desktop screensaver when you walk past his desk.  It is of a band you also like.  Become curious about some of his other tastes and interests, and casually wonder if you two might have a lot in common.  Decide to comment on the band screensaver the next time you walk past.  Do so in an overly enthusiastic manner & feel your cheeks grow hot.  Feel relieved when he responds in a gracious and friendly way, but remain embarrassed and leave his desk a bit too abruptly.

Have several exchanges of this nature.  Grow, not more relaxed, but more comfortable being ill-at-ease in his presence.  Begin to IM here and there, about music and the banality of your jobs. 

The IMs increase in length and frequency, expand in topic.  A rapport is established; a fondness is obvious.  Feel an unexpected sting in your guts when he makes mention of his wife.  He has a wife.

Begin to really look forward to these IMs.  Chomp at the bit to message him the second you get to your desk in the morning.  Exercise tremendous self-control by waiting ten whole minutes.  Vow to let him send the first message the following day.  Fail.  Make the same resolution every day for many, many days.  Succeed every so often. 

Begin to learn a lot about this boy.  Begin to share even more about yourself, compulsively.  Reveal every inch of yourself: your absurd humor, your chronic self-doubt, your spunk.  Trot out every fiber of your big, dumb heart.

Visit him at his desk one day.  When he looks up at you feel as though you have just stepped off a boat.  Something in that look unmoors you, makes you wobbly.  Your pulse bounces for close to an hour afterward.

Ask him if he wants to walk to the workplace café for some coffee.  Make jokes at an astounding rate of speed on the short walk.  Fail to let him chime in.  Fill small, natural gaps in conversation with breathless chatter.

One day, weeks or months into this thing, you receive a message that strikes terror and joy into your heart.  “I need to talk to you.  Can we chat on Facebook tonight?”  What could he need to say to you that he couldn’t say over work IM?  You had already covered your disdain for Catholicism, your outrage over the very existence of Republicans, & the song lyrics that moved you both greatly.    

Think to yourself that whatever he has to tell you must be BIG.  Set a time to cyber-rendezvous& promptly get a horrible stomach ache from nerves.  Speculate over possible harmless reasons a person might need to talk to a friend and co-worker.       

Force yourself to log onto Facebook a couple of minutes after the agreed upon time, even though you have been staring at your laptop for quite awhile.

Kiss him in a small room at work meant for short, casual meetings.  Think that this qualifies.  Climb into his lap and lean in close and very tentatively begin to kiss.  Note how his kissing style differs from your own, from other boys.  Adjust.  Find the rhythm.  Learn.  Decide you love how he kisses.  Decide that it’s perfect.  Decide that many ways he touches you are perfect.  Have moments inside those kisses where you cannot believe it is possible to feel this wonderful.

Remember that you too are in a committed relationship.  Not married, but living with your boyfriend of four years.  You are half of a couple. You are in a relationship. This is how you are identified, even if the coupling, the having of relations, has all but vanished from your flesh’s lexicon.  Even if you have both tacitly eased into being friends & roommates, but the kind of friends who take one another for granted due to deep-seated resentments, the kind of roommates who have self-righteous stand-offs over washing mounting stacks of dishes.

Have a series of earnest conversations with your new boy about leaving your respective mates.  Have these conversations immediately before or immediately after having sex in his car.  You’ve begun to wear skirts most days.  This is partially to look cute for your new boy, but largely due to rushed & cramped sex-logistics.  Your co-workers have noticed your change in attire.  “Girl, look at you! You look so pretty!” one of your favorite co-workers exclaims.  Blush & beam at the same time.  You notice that you have begun to carry yourself differently—with a secret bounce, a shy swagger.

Become even more brazenly inappropriate at work.  At some point each day, sneak off to kiss and grope and gaze at one another with a hungry desperation that will only seem laughable in hindsight.  Spend far more time crafting witty & suggestive IM banter than tending to your actual work.  Begin to resent your job for getting in the way of your on-the-clock love life. 

Stay busy, frantically so.  Occupy every single waking moment of your life with activity, friends, or the boy.  Allow no time for introspection or contemplation.  Know on some level that this is crucial to abiding these circumstances, which on some days—the days after sleepless nights & trembling, coffee-bolstered mornings—seem untenable.  Make a plan to leave your boyfriend as soon as you find another place to live.  Have this plan dramatically accelerated when he finds a fervent chat with the boy that you failed to close on your laptop.  Cry torrentially when he tells you that he has discovered the worst & most elaborately duplicitous thing you have ever done.  Feel the compact, guarded ache in your gut explode through your meticulous, flimsy levies.

Flee the apartment & drive to a dimly lit dead-end street to call the boy for reassurance.  He is at home with his wife and son.  Had you failed to mention his child?  Of course you had.  It complicated things in critical & practical ways, but also, in ways that compromised the health of your soul.  So it was best to vilify the wife for all the reasons the boy told you he no longer loved her,& to forget about the two-year-old son altogether.  When you allowed yourself to think of him, it was always in a fantasy of becoming a beloved second, even preferred, mother to him. Of edging the real mother out in some way that signified you were real& immovable.  Those imagined narratives were necessary, as you had begun to feel nebulous as a person, gaining & losing density depending on how much love the boy bestowed upon you that day, on how much you believed the promises he made to leave her.

He answers his phone in a whisper and tells you he will take the dog for a walk and call you back.  You wonder if his wife has grown suspicious of his newfound love of nighttime dog walks.  You are certain she must know something is very wrong in her marriage.  Has she figured it out?  Sometimes, in addition to the guilt you feel over the adultery, you find yourself rooting for her.  You hope she will find out and wordlessly leave him, filing for divorce in a detached & dignified manner.  You hope that she will never let him see her cry, because he isn’t worth her tears.  You hope for this not because it would make it easier to be with him, but because you have already grown to hate him as intensely as you love him, and because you are incapable of mustering the courage & emotionless discipline to leave him.

When you tell him what has happened, to his credit, he only momentarily sounds as though he thinks you did it intentionally, to force his hand.  You strenuously tell him and yourself that this oversight was accidental because you never wished to hurt your boyfriend this way.  But you wonder if the dark & suffocating guilt of it all has spread like smoke into every alcove of your being, fogging your vigilance so you could finally open a valve and release these scalding shadows. 

Later that summer he announces that his wife has plans to take their son to Iowa for a visit with her sister.  You savor the idea of having whole days to spend with him instead of stolen minutes at work, or that swift hourglass of time after work spent drinking dark, sweet beer on the patio of a pub, & then sojourning to his car—that absurdly small & cramped Camry.  In the twilight, parked in the far back of the pub & obscured slightly by trees, you sometimes feel invincible.  And at other times you feel…..not quite invisible, but like you are disappearing.  Shadows move in the back window of the pub’s kitchen.  A busboy watching or a curtain closed. 

You drive six hours to visit your friend for a long weekend.  Those four days are as much an attempt at respite from your obsessive lust and despair as they are a tactic to make him miss you fiercely & expedite leaving his wife.  When you return, you meet at a park & tromp through the high grasses to the perfect secluded clearing where you had had sex— or had begun to have sex and then abruptly stopped and cried—for the first time.  You have brought a small bag of pungent weed with you, a parting gift from your friend.   Although you have smoked a handful of times in the past, you are by no means an expert, & you rely on him to carefully roll the joint.  He does so almost tenderly with his long, thin fingers, which match his lanky body.  He is exactly one foot taller than you, and so much skinnier than any guy you have ever been with.  You have never been attracted to anyone like him before, & you cannot understand why he exerts such a hold over you.  The only thing you can point to is the way he looks at you.  No one has ever looked at you so directly & so deeply.  His gaze makes you look away, embarrassed, and then look back, defiant& emboldened.  It makes you feel vulnerable& audacious in an instant, every time.  And that slam of adrenaline gets you high as the moon.

You get very, very stoned.  The anxious brand of high that requires you to do something distracting & engrossing enough to keep your mind from sprinting down too-dark or wincingly bright corridors.  Sex seems like the only viable option.  Focus your ricocheting mind on disrobing him. Purposefully unbutton his shirt; matter-of-factly unbuckle his belt.  Pull him atop you so you can feel his weight, which you are relying upon to keep yourself from zinging up into the stratosphere.  Dispense with the tender kisses immediately.  You need unyielding pressure to muffle the sound of your heartbeat between your temples.  Mosquitoes permeate the night, planting itchy kisses all over your skin.  Eventually, the insects drive you back inside his car.  Begin posing hypothetical questions to him under the guise of it being a fun game.  Start off lightheartedly, but soon take a turn for the morbid.  You are still very high, & from way up here you can see the universe rapidly expanding& you are trying to chase after it with a reluctant, dawdling lover in tow.  He will not entertain your darkness& halts you sternly.  You feel hurt and impudent.

When his wife and child finally leave town you let him bring you to his place.  Your countless reservations take a backseat to your burning need to see his home, which has achieved an almost mythical status in your mind.  A place so little discussed, yet oppressively omnipresent.    

When he shows you in, it is a struggle to adjust your imagined version of his house to the actuality of it.  The thorough and detailed abode in your mind was nothing like this.  This architecture is completely incorrect, the floor plan jumbled & backwards.  Tell him so.  Do it in a way you know he’ll find funny & adorable.  In a way that will elicit from him a look that says he loves your imagination& your satirization of yourself, & the very fact that you had been thinking about the place he spends his time when he isn’t with you.  Understand in that moment that much of who you are with him is performance. You have mastered this blend of exaggerated whimsy with sardonic undertones, accompanied by a subtle nod to your devotion to him.  Sometimes it makes you feel deceitful to play up the qualities you know he treasures.  Other times, you feel a thrill over knowing precisely how to exercise your power. Mostly, though, you relish seeing yourself through his eyes.  You are your best self, in some ways, when you are with him.  This charming and confident nymphet is someone you quite enjoy portraying.  Moral considerations aside, you highly prefer her over your genuine self—the one burdened with self-doubt& integrity.

You meet his pets with bated breath, understanding that animals are highly attuned to energy. You worry that your throbbing aura of guilt will tip them off & they will react violently or with watchful contempt.  Thankfully this isn’t the case.  Both dogs—the squat salt & pepper loaf with large, ever-alarmed eyes & the caramel Labrador-Pointer with a gracious, disarming face— are excited to meet you.  The diminutive black cat becomes especially attached and hurdles child-gates to follow you to the bathroom.  You trust their instincts over your own.  You allow their pet-love to become very significant in your mind.  You shape it into a good omen, into absolution.

On each of the three nights you stay over, the boy excuses himself to answer a call from his wife.  You cannot make out the words, but during the first conversation you hear the strain in his voice as he speaks to her from the far bedroom.  The second time she calls he goes out to the backyard to pace.  You look out the kitchen window, watching his face cloud, becoming the overcast of a sky resigned to hold its ground against the sun, but unable to summon the strength to rain.  On the third night, you tell him to stay with you in the living room while he speaks with his wife.  You say this firmly & he complies.  Less than a minute into the conversation you regret making this demand.  You don’t want to hear his defeated voice.  You wave to get his attention and mouth the word “Go”.  He nods sadly and walks to the back of the house. 

Anger and sorrow and searing empathy converge and contort in your gut, tying a hard knot there.  You walk over to the shelf that holds their wedding album.  You’ve known it was there all these days, but respectfully left it untouched.  Now you open it deliberately, careful not to rush the experience.  You linger on each photograph masochistically, unconcerned with him finding you paging through his past and confirming that he had been very happy with her at one time.  And you see how happiness is the least reliable gauge of future, the most easily & imperceptibly derailed.  How it dies by degrees. You force yourself to look at his wife in each picture, to notice her guileless smile and excited blue eyes.  You say “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” over and over in your head.  You put the album back in its place and head directly to the fridge where you open a strong beer and drain it in a long series of gulps that leaves you out of breath.

Your boyfriend wants you to stay, despite your indiscretions, as long as you promise they will cease.  Make this promise knowing you can’t keep this promise.  Numbly allow him to re-woo you with gifts of tiramisu and four packs of Guinness.  Some favorite things he remembers about you from a time when he cared about knowing your favorite things.  Watch television when you are together so you don’t have to make eye contact or speak or notice the other person is there all that often.  Sob disproportionately at a series finale so that he guesses correctly that you are leaving him again.

Follow through with your decision and move out of your shared apartment and in with your grandmother.  Believe you’ve finally summoned the elusive confidence and spunk that will transfer over to giving the boy an ultimatum, and of leaving him if he fails to comply, if he fails at loving you.  Listen to Aretha Franklin at top volume in your car, whizzing past trees and Starbucks and an insurance company and all the other strangely wooden scenery of your life. 

Leave work early one day and sit on the floor in the bedroom you’re occupying in your grandma’s loving home.  The room where your grandpa spent the last days of his life in hospice care.  The room where you and your brother took turns retelling funny childhood stories to his ravaged and beautiful face.  He was listening even though he couldn’t respond.  He gave the ghost of a flicker of a smile at one of your memories and you came undone.  But you excused yourself and went into the bathroom to weep quietly into a hand towel like an adult.

Seated on this bedroom floor, begin to take your sleeping pills methodically, one at a time.  Stop at eight pills and text your ex boyfriend, telling him what you’ve just done.  Eight pills seems like a respectable suicide attempt.  It seems like whether you die or live, it will be fate.  And you are going to see if fate looks like a rescue or nothing at all. 

Surface inside some version of conscious in the hospital and have fog-tinged memories of your mom and dad and brother being there.  Experience guilt and remorse deeper than any abyss you had heretofore spent time in.  Spend months clawing upward.

Meet a different boy not too terribly long after this prolonged season of pain and diminishment.  Know he is everything the old boy could never be.  Know he is everything you've ever wanted and felt undeserving of.  Feel your heart gasp like a revived patient when he tells you he loves you.  The wince of your history comes on its tail, though.  Feel a responsibility to protect him from your brand of misdeed and misery.    

Take sleeping pills again, an uncounted heap in your palm this time, because the new boy is so good and he shouldn’t have to endure your sludge of shame and darkness for an instant, let alone a lifetime.  Decide to do everyone this great favor, to make this grand sacrifice. 

When he comes to see you in the hospital you rip apart from the inside, all your seams bursting wide, spilling out singing light and choking tar and sourest bile and all manner of storms.  Look up at the fluorescent lights with their unflinching illumination.  Look down at your IV with its relentless sustenance.  Close your eyes and catch the silhouette of a girl softly smiling under a silver moon in the distance.  Make plans to meet her there, years from now.                      

Smallest Gifts

When a friend invited me to a dance/slumber party at her church in the 6th grade I was understandably hesitant; the rejection and humiliation I had experienced at my own school dances was still fresh.  But attending this event had the advantage of anonymity.  I had no dorky past tailing me, at least as far as anyone there knew.  I could be anyone I wanted to be.  I could be....cool.  Or so I told myself as I browsed Fashion Bug with my mom and a friend for the perfect outfit.  The shirt I settled on was a black and white button-up with sheer white sleeves.  The pants were denim with black lace running up the sides in a racy stripe from shoe to hip.  I'm sure there was some sort of chunky plastic jewelry to really bring the outfit together. 

When I descended into the musty church basement with my backpack containing my toothbrush, sparkly lip gloss, and my most flattering pajamas I was relieved that other than the friend who brought me, there were no familiar faces.  My friend's sister and sister's friend were also in attendance.  They were probably 15 years old and seemed weary of the church dance/sleepover scene.  Their angst and snark could only be rivaled by my own, three years from then.  I assumed that the older kids were probably cooler than us based on age alone, so I tried to echo their derision of the whole situation.  After the pastor welcomed us and introduced the DJ the lights were dimmed and music flooded the room.  I didn't want to appear over-eager so I consciously ignored the dance floor and all people in the room aside from my friend with whom I whispered and giggled.  So I was taken completely off guard when I got a tap on my shoulder.  A skinny boy with gel in his hair rushed the question: "Will you dance with my friend over there.  His name is Jesse."  He gestured to the other side of the dance floor at a boy sitting sheepishly on a metal folding chair.  I tried to get a handle on my total surprise.  I went with, "Ummm?"  The 12 year old wingman must have taken my flabbergasted speechlessness as my being too cool to dance with his friend.  "Just one dance?" he urged. "Okay" I said, standing up on wobbly legs and walking blinkingly into the too-bright illumination of the wandering spotlight on the dance floor.  I saw the boy hop up from his chair and walk to meet me midway.  We both faltered a bit at that point.  With neither of us uttering a word we began to stiffly sway with our hands on one another's shoulders.   He never thought to place them on my hips and I found myself grateful for the oversight.  We were about as far away from one another as two people could possibly get and still technically be dancing together.  If there was any eye contact at all during that dance it was of the darting variety.  We gazed past each other at the people seated at tables encircling the dance floor.  As we swayed and turned in a choppy counterclockwise motion I caught the eye of my friend a few times and she looked happy for me.  I was exhilarated, but also panicked.  I wanted the song to end so I could flee to my table and regroup and formulate a game plan.  Little did I know that the song, November Rain, clocked in around nine minutes long.  My first slow dance turned out to be a marathon.  As the epic rock ballad blared on I grew increasingly anxious.  The guitar solo was particularly excruciating.  By song's end the tops of my shoulders were wet with sweat from his hands and my dazed smile had begun to make my face ache.  We parted with nervous smiles and went back to our friends.

"How was it?" my friend asked.  "Great!" I lied.  Now that it was over I felt rapt at having finally had this experience and promptly went to work altering the details in my brain to make it into something magical.  But I had little time to amend anything because the boy's friend was back, this time asking if I'd dance with him.  Again, I was unprepared for the request, and again my pause seemed to suggest that I thought I was far too cool to dance with the wingman, as evidenced by his somewhat shrill and urgent, "Please?"  There was no way I was going to make this nice boy feel rejected so I rose to dance with him.  I don't remember the song, but I remember wondering which boy was cuter.  I honestly couldn't parse it out.  I settled on the first boy I had danced with based largely on the fact that he had a better haircut and an earring.  The remainder of the dance followed this pattern: a break of a song or two to whisper to our respective friend and then one of the boys would ask me to dance.  I never said no even though I was close to having a heart attack and throwing up from the unrelenting awkwardness.  As the dance wore on I noticed that my friend's sister's disposition had soured further, if that were even possible.  And her ire seemed to be laser-fixed on me.  I was really confused for close to an hour before I realized that she had mistaken me for a cool girl who boys liked.  She had no idea that I was generally in the position she found herself in that night: ignored and rejected.  I wanted to clarify things, but there didn't seem to be anything I could say that didn't sound unintentionally mean.  "No, really, I'm a total nobody too!  I'm just somehow tricking everyone tonight!"  Plus I wanted to savor this newfound identity.  I was alluring.  I was cool.  I was.....pretty?  I wasn't going to weigh in on that last one just yet. 

After the dance portion of the evening was over we had an hour or so to hang out with the lights on and have some snacks before they turned on the movie before bed.  I remember being floored that this church had selected "Wayne's World".  During the break before the movie it was revealed that the boy, Jesse, still didn't know my name.  The lie came out of my mouth unexpectedly.  "Lisa," I said.  My friend was surprised, but went with it.  It sort of felt right to make up a name.  I certainly didn't feel like myself that night.  I decided to be whoever I wanted to be that night.  I decided to be confident and mysterious and coquettish.  My friend and I had many pow wows in the bathroom to reapply lip gloss and to decide what other things I should make up about myself to tell the boys.  I decided to tell them that I had a boyfriend, but it wasn't going well.  The boys spent a lot of time trying to convince me to break up with my ficticious boyfriend to date Jesse.  At this point the wingman had returned to his proper role.  When it was time to climb into our sleeping bags on the hardest basement floor in the history of the world I was relieved that the adults had separated the boys from the girls.  I had no idea how I could maintain my coolness and sleep at the same time; this whole charade took far more commitment to being inauthentic than I had realized going in.  I have no idea how I fell asleep that night, but I did, and when morning greeted me it was almost immediately time to pack up and get picked up by our parents.  I had a quick, unsatisfying goodbye with Jesse.  There was no time to exchange phone numbers and I wouldn't have wanted to anyway, as every element of my autobiography was a total fabrication.  I suddenly felt immense regret that I hadn't given him the chance to know me as Tracy, with all of the real Tracy details.  He might have really like me.  And now I'd never know.  Still, I knew I'd keep this memory in my heart like a small fire, stoking it whenever I needed to feel okay about myself.              

Smallest Rejections

Early wounds are the most formative and the toughest to overcome.  For a long time I gently chastised or outright mocked myself for the childhood traumas that would bubble up years, decades after the fact.  They seemed so minor, so unworthy of eliciting the grief or shame that still accompanied the memory.  But these memories remain clearer sometimes than what happened yesterday.  And this is beginning to tell me that it might be important--crucial, even--to visit them in earnest and see what they have to teach me.

When I began the 6th grade--my first year in middle school--I began to more clearly observe a hierarchy of coolness.  It seemed almost pre-ordained, if the extent to which I was, from the outset, excluded from the upper echelon had anything to do with it.  I didn't want to be in the popular crowd to be worshipped or to feel better than anybody.  It simply seemed like life was easier, more fun, more effortless if you happened to find yourself in their ranks.  The things that unfolded around me seemed like the natural order.  Kids (the cool ones) began pairing off into couples at an astounding rate.  At the time I assumed that age 12 was when everyone began to have a boyfriend or girlfriend.  I remember waiting just inside the heavy school doors at the end of a school day for my mom to pick me up.  It was gray and snowy outside.  A few other kids waited as well; two of them were dating as of that week and they began to kiss passionately.  No adults were in the vicinity to discourage them.  As I alternated between watching for my mom's gray Oldsmobile and glancing at the kids making out nearby, I remember thinking several things:  How do they know how to kiss?  Am I supposed to know who to do that by now?  How can I find a boyfriend soon?  I'm clearly falling way behind with this stuff.  Who would be willing to be my boyfriend?

While these worries are painfully adorable now, at the time they were quite real and all-consuming. I tried to turn my attention to the things I loved--reading and writing and sleepovers with my friends.  When I was in the company of my friends, especially my best friend, things felt much less stressful.  But many of my classes lacked the comfort and security of my posse.  I felt exposed and vulnerable in these places and my only available option in the total absence of any real confidence was feigned self-esteem and quick forays into a bathroom stall to cry when I felt I had said or done something stupid in the presence of cool kids. 

I was much like an anthropologist of cool behavior.  I observed and recorded everything they said and did to memory.  Every style of clothing, catch phrase, attitude and opinion was synthesized into an approximation of who and how I should be.  But in trying to replicate the things I observed I not only felt like a wooden actress in a play whose script changed ceaselessly, I felt like it was horribly obvious to everyone else that I was a fraud.  And I concluded that the coolness I observed could not be imitated; it was inborn.  Which meant that what I lacked was something innate and fundamental.   It meant that I could never possess what I needed to be cool and popular and to have a boyfriend.

Having come to this depressing conclusion, I was at a loss as to how to proceed.  In time I would completely change my opinion of these kids.  I would decide that they were cruel and shallow and boring.  I would loathe them and pity them at the same time.  I would retreat into a world insulated by sarcasm and cynicism.  And I'd almost never acknowledge that I still believed that I was inferior to them in some deep and unchangeable way. 

But in 6th grade I wasn't ready to make that leap.  So I felt deeply bad about myself almost all of the time, and my only hope was that one small thing might change to make me less abhorrent.  I awaited a miracle.  When the first school dance came around I cautiously entertained the idea that this was my miracle.  I'd never attended a dance before and had only a vague idea of what they entailed from television.  I thought that maybe the soft lighting and music might magically inspire a cute boy to really notice me for the first time and to ask me to dance.  I supposed I had better show up just in case.  So I waited in line in the gymnasium, dollar in hand, for entry into the lunchroom/auditorium where the tables had been folded up to reveal a big empty room much dimmer than when I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in it a few hours earlier.  A DJ was on the stage where our choir would perform in a couple of months.  He began playing music I didn't like, but pretended to.  I stood rigid against a wall with my friends waiting to see what was supposed to happen.  It didn't take long before girls and boys began slow dancing together.  I never really saw how it happened.  But suddenly the kids who enjoyed such popularity for their beauty and athleticism and relentless confidence were taking turns dancing with one another.  The rest of us remained along the walls, in the shadows.  A few non-popular girls, well-adjusted beyond their years, danced around together to the fast songs and laughed and seemed to have a good time.  I just watched and made jokes with my friends while my stomach sank so low I thought maybe the rest of me could join it and just disappear altogether.  No such luck.

I subjected myself to one more 6th grade dance a couple of months later.  I knew the lay of the land.  And I had a plan.  I thought if I could just dance with one boy who wasn't a total dork, maybe that would nudge me out of this rut and into the nascent stage of being someone worth being.  At the first dance I had observed a boy, who was of average popularity at best, dancing with a number of cool girls.  He was kind of a class clown and way more confident than his place on the social ladder warranted.  I was also pretty funny, if only my handful of friends knew it.  Maybe one dance with him would do something to make me perceived as cool in some way.  The boy wasn't cute, to me, at least.  And I didn't have even the tiniest crush on him, so I wouldn't feel that nervous about it, I reasoned.  It was ideal on a lot of levels, I thought.  But I was nervous, of course.  I had a lot riding on this--my entire sense of hope and self-worth, as it were.  Midway through the dance I asked my friend to ask the boy to dance with me.  From my place along the wall I waited with what I hoped was a casual and confident smile on my face.  I saw as he looked over and then looked back at my friend, shaking his head and laughing.  From a distance I saw his lips form the words, "No, I don't think so.  No."  As my friend came back to give me the bad news I already knew, something welled up inside me that felt like ice and fire fighting for a stranglehold.  I made myself be still and composed by numbness for five full minutes.  Then without a word to anyone I slipped outside the dance, then outside the school and waited at the curb for my mom to pick me up.

"How was the dance?" Mom asked with a smile.

The numbness had turned into something brittle that shattered instantly at kindness and love coming from another human being.  I sobbed all the way home, unable to utter a word to explain what I was feeling.  When we pulled into the garage my mom said I had to tell her what was going on.  And I know it came forth like a flood.  What had happened that day.  How even my attempt to set my sights on someone I thought was closer to my level had failed, that I was even worse--uglier, stupider--worse in every way--than I had already believed.  And I know my mom did everything she could to build me back up with the strong, sane wisdom age and experience granted her, and with love.  And I know that it helped a little.  But something hardened into a flinty certainty of shame in my gut that day, jabbing and raking against my insides with the slightest jostle from that day forward. 

And all I can think today, as I wind my way backward to all the experiences that informed this one, with all manner of unkind teacher and classmates who tacitly or outright enforced this hierarchy that promotes shame and self-hatred, is that we have to understand how damaging our words and actions can be.  I come from a loving family, one who gave me unconditional love and support, and somehow that wasn't enough to save me from this crushing sense of unworthiness. 

And how can I help my little boy from feeling this way?  How do I empower myself and him in a world that can still feel so cruel and malicious? 

I suppose I can tell my truth.  It's a start.