Cover Your Mouth When You Blog

The Thing About Winter

Watching Lake Michigan's still, gray water from the passenger seat of his car, I said, “The thing about winter is it forces people inside to contend with themselves for a while.”

“And is that a good thing?” he asked.

“Depends on whether they’re up for it, I guess.”

He’s been giving me rides home from work lately. He usually comes up when he drops me off. Most nights he stays. A few nights ago, J called while he and I were lying in bed. “Who’s that?” he asked, pinching my side a little, after I glanced at the name on the chiming phone and placed it face-down on the window sill. I’d known who it was without looking.

"He calls me in the middle of the night.”

“He calls you when he’s been drinking.”

“Sometimes. Not always.”

“He says what? I miss you? I love you?”

“Not really. We just talk.”

“Does he know about me?”

“No.”

“He’d be upset?”

“I think so. I really can’t deal with that right now.”

Then I asked him about the end of his last relationship. “I just couldn’t deal,” he said, “I guess I didn’t for a long time.”

He told me about a period of deep depression and cocaine and I pressed my forehead to the space between his shoulder blades and said, “I’m sorry you went through that.” I kept my face there, eyes closed and wanted him to keep talking. “What happened? Why’d she leave? Do you still love her?” I didn’t care about the answers, not for the usual reasons anyway. I wanted to inhale his story, his pain, however raw or stale, I wanted to breathe it in quickly, straight to my brain. Soon he was on top of me and I could escape again – mind and body in heart-thumping preoccupation. Dizzying avoidance.

“I’ve got no moral judgments about what you’re doing,” my therapist said a few days later, “This distraction thing with this new guy. But it might be helpful to at least theorize about what you’re numbing yourself against.”

“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth” I said, “It's hazy. I guess that means it’s working.”

But winter in Chicago is long and he couldn’t come over tonight.

Things I Knew All Along: Part I

Sometimes I think John and I fell in love in New Orleans. We didn't. The first time we were in New Orleans together was a year into our relationship, long after we'd said I love you. But he emailed me one day at work, during those tentative weeks when we'd first met and were just friends, and asked about my recent trip to New Orleans with friends. Tell me some stories, he wrote.

I wrote, Well, the hotel was awesome. An old converted house kind of. Lots of New Orleans charm. Got there Sat. afternoon, got some fried goods and oysters, shopped a bit, met my friends' friends who came up from Florida with their cute little baby. Went out and ate a thousand more oysters. Went back to the hotel and rocked the little baby to sleep to some Lucinda Williams. Drank, acted obnoxious, jumped on the bed for 20 min. trying to get Tina to wake up and go out with us, fell into the wall, got a bruise on my back. Went down to Frenchman street, saw an awesome band with a big horn section, danced, danced, danced. Annoyed Greg by spilling beer on his jeans. Shrimp po' boy from verti mart at 4am. Slept. Woke up. Hangover. Excedrin. Beignets in the morning, sat in jackson square. Beautiful weather. Shopped, walked around, more oysters at Acme. Napped. Dinner at Copelands (place my boss suggested . . . yum.) Back to Frenchman St. Made some new best friends at the Apple Barrel (aka the Crapple Barrel by its regulars). Got a palm reading from Jimmy the bartender and then a neuroscientist who was in town for the neuroscience convention analyzed a dream I had (b/c apparently neuroscientists can do that?). Drank a thousand 2 dollar beers. Left around 5am after deciding not to make out with the Willie Nelson singing guitar player, Brad, after extensive conversation about the legalization of marijuana and after some girl named Kristy called the bar and he told the bartender to tell her he wasn't there. Slept on the couch of some dude's apartment that Jen felt the need to make out with. 'Cause if he turned out to be an axe murderer I guess it would be better if he killed us both? Caught the bus back to the hotel looking like the morning after. Ate. Flew home. There's a synopsis for you. I love new orleans.

He wrote, Did I ever tell you I have a huge crush on you? He hadn't. But I'd known this all along.

I told him I bought him a souvenir from a homeless man who'd wandered into the bar on Frenchman Street. "Really it was just the smallest thing that he was selling and so I bought it because he was nice and then I thought, you know, John will really love this tattered, seashell-imprinted leather wallet." I gave it to him a few days later after we went to a movie and our knees came close to touching as we slouched in our seats. He carried the thin, dirty wallet for months; eventually it split in two at the fold.

"What're you gonna do with a man's wallet?" Jimmy the bartender had asked me after I passed the homeless man four dollars and slipped the wallet into my purse.

"Give it to a friend," I'd said.

"A man?" he'd asked.

"Yeah, a man. John."

"You're sittin' here in this city thinkin' about him? While he's up there in Chicago?"

"I guess so. He's kind of a new friend."

"That ain't no friend smile you're wearin', darlin."

I'd known this all along.

[This is a work in process.]

Stage II or Mentally Constructing a Melodramatic Future Blog Post While Watching a Rock Show

First there's Denial and then there's Anger.

Anger that I'm thinking of you tonight because I realized the band I've come to see is the same band that sat next to us at that wedding I went to with you two years ago and you said, "That's The Ponys at the table on our left," and I whispered, "Really?" and stole glances at the girl guitarist as she cut her vegan hotdog into bite-sized pieces. A hipster wedding, replete with ironic 80's music for the walk down the aisle and an officiant wearing a too small thrift store suit with an orange jacket and butterfly collared shirt that a girl in the bathroom said was untucked because the zipper on his pants had split. Anger that you wouldn't dance with me after dinner, not even to the slow songs. Anger that when your friend with the longish black hair who restores old furniture and makes soy ice cream in his free time asked what I did for a living and I told him, you said, "It pays the bills."

Anger that I recognize the beautiful girl taking pictures of the band from the right side of the stage and her husband standing next to her and that I want to say Hi, but I can't remember his name, because you only introduced us once, because people were always too this or too that for you to really be friends with them. Anger that before I met them you said, "They're impressed that you went to Portugal to build a house," and I felt a zing in my chest, struggling to tamp down the tiny voice inside that wanted to ask, "Did you sound proud when you told them? Do you think I've done something good? Important?" Anger that I always thought the answer was no.

Anger that every time I mentioned inviting another couple over for dinner, that couple you knew and we'd met for drinks, the couple with the guy with the same first name as me, you always said, "They'd probably be happy just going out somewhere," or "But what would we cook?" And I'd say, "I'd like to have them over to my new place though," and "We have that recipe for Ropa Vieja and we could make mojitos." When I ran into that couple when you weren't with me they said, "Congrats on your new place!" and the girl hugged me. Anger that she said, "J said it's very "adult" looking." And I laughed and said, "That's a weird thing to say." Anger that I realized later that you didn't want this couple, both public service lawyers, to see how much money I made. You didn't want them to see the Crate & Barrel sofa and the new TV. Anger that you were embarrassed of something I was proud to have accomplished.

Anger that the time you told me a girl in the record store had an engagement ring with a small diamond embedded flush into the band - "She said it only cost $1,200" - and I said I didn't really like that style, you thought that meant I wanted something bigger and more expensive and you called me materialistic. Anger that I knew then that when you felt threatened, when you felt vulnerable, inadequate - by your own standards, not mine - I would be the sacrificial lamb for an ego fractured in childhood. Anger that leaving you was an act of self-preservation.

If you read this you'd be angry. Angry that I have misrepresented you in many ways. Angry that I've left out the tender, loving, accepting, encouraging parts. Angry that I've made myself blameless. But that's the Anger Stage of loss - it doesn't remember. And the reality is, you will never read this. Because you never did. Even when I asked you to. And there's anger about that, too.

"Eventually they all move on."

Over a two-week period in the sixth grade, three-fourths of the only two pair of identical twins in my small junior high school went away.

Brit and Drew – the girl twins – moved with their parents and older sister to a town in Oklahoma called Broken Arrow and, a week before they left, threw a party around their backyard, in-ground pool where white cupcakes with white frosting were served, each topped with a single colored gumball.

One half of the other set of twins – the boys – left exactly a week later. Sean, of Sean and Dean, died on the floorboard of his family’s minivan when it skidded into oncoming traffic on a rainy drive home from shopping in Wichita.

I remember, about four days after Sean’s funeral, walking into the kitchen where my mother stood rinsing a colander of green grapes in the sink, clutching my arms around her waist and pressing myself to her side. She turned, the faucet still running, and draped her arms over my back, letting them sway gently back and forth like windshield wipers. I was small for my age and we still fit together like mother and child; it would be almost four years before I would sprout breasts and hips and outgrow her. It felt strange then still, to burrow my wet face into a place in her sternum familiar from childhood and sob. I think that I said, “I feel like everyone’s leaving,” or if I didn’t, I remember feeling it. Not sorrow or longing; after all, I hadn’t known Brit, Drew or Sean all that well. It was a small town and so everyone knew everyone, and the girls fell into the wide circle of my slumber party circuit, but I didn’t miss them in any real way, or Sean who had only moved to our town at the beginning of the school year.  Still, I felt abandoned somehow - left out, as if Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and wherever it was that Sean had gone were essentially the same place. Away.

This feeling resurfaced and surprised me yesterday, flipping through the Chicago Reader on the train to work. “This Party’s Over” was the headline under Chicago Antisocial, a weekly column written by Liz Armstrong, a (by all observations) shallow, immature, self-obsessed woman charged with documenting her weekly escapades in the world of Chicago’s hipsters and scenesters. I read the column infrequently, finding even a two-dimensional, black and white recounting of a night in the life of the woman who once proclaimed herself “the party girl of Chicago” to be too exhausting to endure on a weekly basis. Turns out the “Party’s Over” because Ms. Armstrong is moving to Las Vegas. Well, who cares, right? Sayonara? But, no, my heart sank as I read the only paragraph written by Armstrong that’s ever struck within a block of a chord:

“Chicago’s a transient city, which makes it exciting—there’s always something or someone new. But eventually everyone you know leaves. People from small towns come to try out living in a city; people from larger cities come for a break. Eventually they all move on.”

The train stalled over the Chicago River and I thought of my friend Angie, living once five blocks from me in Boystown, living now on the Upper West Side of NYC, and of the two sets of married friends who’d defected to Colorado in the past three years, in search of space and natural beauty. I remembered startling awake from a nap on the couch one bright weekend afternoon in the stark white apartment on Aldine Ave., the words “everyone’s leaving” on my lips, days after learning that my ex-boyfriend was moving to LA with the girl he’d started dating two weeks after we broke up. <

At work I cyber-stalked that ex-boyfriend and found his band’s website and a photo of him, shaved head and a silver band around his left ring finger. I Googled other former flames to no avail, cursing all the common-named men from my past; it’s impossible to sift through all the hits associated with a name like Steve Evans or Frank Lewis. Eventually I MyStalked a guy I’d dated for just three weeks in 2003 and unfortunately slept with in his apartment above Bangkok Restaurant on Halsted just before he got back together with his ex-girlfriend. I found him single, living in New York City and having written a very funny post about school kids with rolling backpacks on his MySpace blog. I wanted to email him and tell him I’d enjoyed the post. I wanted him not to forget his apartment on Halsted Street that smelled of cigarettes and peanut sauce. I wanted him not to forget me.

J mentioned once that if “eventually everything fell apart here,” he’d probably move to Birmingham, since he’d been spending so much time there anyway.

“If everything fell apart?” I’d asked.

“Yeah, with work or whatever,” he’d said.

“Well, what about me?” I’d asked.

“For you, I’d stay.”

I startled awake in bed last night, a tingle of panic in my chest, my jaw sore from clenching, the words “don’t leave” caught in the back of my throat. It took a split second for my conscious mind to catch up and I rolled to his side of the bed, knowing that it was empty because I’d asked him to leave, knowing that my life will not be how I imagined it would be, knowing that J might one day be a Google search and I’ll be thankful for the unusual last name that I once imagined hyphenated behind mine. I gripped the fat pillow he used to sleep on and wanted to stop the rotation of the earth. I wanted to clutch my arms around the sturdiest part of him and feel his hands on my back and his whiskers on my cheek, the two of us fitting together how we used to before I think I outgrew him.

This Thankgiving, I'm thankful not to be you.

"Are you a recent break-up?" she asked, sitting beside me on a barstool, our elbows resting on the granite countertop of a mutual friend's kitchen. We'd been introduced when I arrived for this pre-Thanksgiving Thankgiving dinner for an extended group of friends. A couple glasses of chardonnay in, I must've mentioned my ex-boyfriend with an inflection that betrayed a certain freshness to the prefix attached to that word.

"Yeah, about two months ago," I answered.

"Me too! Three days ago!"

"Oh. Wow. That's . . . recent." I watched her eyes for a cue, for the proper emotion to emulate.

"Yeah! We were supposed to go look at rings, but instead we broke up."

"Oh shit."

"Yeah! Shit!" A hard laugh sputtered like a machine-gun from her throat.

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I called him and said 'Today's November 17th; remember what we're supposed to do today?' and he said, 'Yeah, we should probably talk about that."

"Oh shit. I'm so sorry."

"Yeah, and I've been doing this ever since," she lifted her wine glass from the countertop. "This and shopping. Just stay busy; that's the key after a break-up. NO downtime!"

Really? I thought, because this afternoon, after I smoothed my staticky hair into a ponytail and laced up my sneakers, I had the overwhelming urge to get into bed fully clothed and take a nap.

"Yes, NO downtime at all. You just have to stay busy busy busy. And drunk. That's my plan anyway. Also, I'm going to start taking a kickboxing class at that martial arts place on the corner where Western turns into Lincoln?"

"Oh yeah, I've seen it. There's always that big van parked outside?"

"Yeah, that's the one. So, I'm going to start taking a kickboxing class there because I feel like punching and kicking things. You know?"

Not really. Mostly, I've felt like getting into some sort of machine that would mercilessly twist my body into a corkscrew, like a wet towel, wringing every emotion out onto the floor and then depositing me onto the sofa to lie limp for hours with a marathon showing of "The Bachelor: Rome" on TV, so I can watch the silly women tell the camera about their "connection" with Lorenzo, the Italian Prince of New Jersey, and think, at least I'm not you.

"So what happened with your guy?" she asked leaning close, taking an audible gulp from her wine glass.

"Mmmm, well, I guess I was waiting for some things to change and finally realized that they weren't going to. And to him, it was unfair that I was asking him to change and after almost three years I realized maybe he was right. Maybe if I couldn't love him how he was, I shouldn't be with him."

"So you ended it?"

"So I ended it." I wanted the distinction to be made between her and me. I am not like you. I wanted her to be sure of it. I do not need to numb reality with wine and constant social interaction. I can sit alone and sober for hours on end. I am not sad in the way that you are sad. I am not going to fall apart in the way that you are inevitably going to fall apart once you stop moving.

As the afternoon progressed and faces familiar to me filed into the kitchen carrying Pyrex dishes and bottles of wine, I migrated slowly away from the barstool she occupied. And in a few hours over turkey and gravy and green bean casserole, when her eyes looked foggy and heavy and her voice had become loud and nasal from the other end of the long wooden table, she put on her coat to leave and said, "So, Rae, I'll email you about that kickboxing class. We need to go punch some things together!"

And I said okay. But I wanted her to go. And I didn't want to be a part of the Embittered Single Women's Kickboxing Club. I am not like you, I wanted to whisper as she hugged me by the door. It seemed important that I make that distinction.

Be My Guest

About five years ago, my brother asked if he could read something I'd written for a creative writing course I was taking at a local fine arts college at the time, so I emailed him a story about a trip I'd taken with three girlfriends over fourth of July weekend during which my friend Kelly's Ford Escort began to sputter and cough smoke en route to St. Louis and we'd ended up stranded for the night in a town just off the highway called Boonville. I received an email from him the next day that quoted from the story:

"Trapped in Boonville. I imagined hanging out the local tavern and falling in love with a young, scruffy-faced man who wore Stetson cologne and flannel shirts. A manly type of man would would open doors for me and hold my hand as I stretched my leg to step into his large pick-up truck, the kind with four wheels on the back that are impossible to pass on the highway. We would get married and live on the outskirts of Boonville and our children would ride the bus to school. While he worked at the Plant during the day, I would pick fresh strawberries from the garden and make jars of jam to give to the neighbors and sell at a stand every October at the Boonville town festival." [emphasis his].

He went on to say, "I loved this. I laughed, thinking . . . this is my sister . . . this is how she thinks."

It has always been much easier for me to share the fruits of my right brain's labor with strangers than with friends or family. Somehow a room full of strangers at a writing studio or a billion sets of eyes plugged into the World Wide Web (or the twelve sets that may actually visit this blog) seem a safer, more comfortable audience. There's a decent-sized room in one corner of my brain where a tidbit of news on the war in Iraq, a rant against feminism I'd read in the online version of a UK newspaper, the way my nostrils appeared in a picture I'd looked at that morning and a thousand other microcosmic pieces of information that are not integral to my life or the workings of my daily routine are being constantly diced, ground and mixed in a rusty, sometimes loud machine that takes up most of the room. Occasionally, eventually, the machine spits something almost coherent into a more conscious lobe of my brain and I'm able to get it down on paper, or onto this blog. And then the machine continues to grind.

To invite a group of unaquainted passers-by - members of a writing class, or you, dear reader - for a tour of this room requires little to no preparation. No need to polish up the machine or parse through the thoughts being worked over and tuck away certain topics or ideas to avoid offense, embarrassment or the exposition of something too private or dripping with the stench of strong opinion. Strangers don't care about your mess, beyond its intrigue.

But a close friend on a tour of this room might spot that comment she made last week about your recent break-up being "For The Best" just as it slides through a chute and lands on the conveyor belt next to your Need To Mourn The Loss of This Relationship The Way The Middle Eastern Women You've Seen on TV Mourn Their Dead, with tears and howling and stumbling in dusty streets. And then that friend might feel ashamed for having said the wrong thing or betrayed that you have secretly mashed her well-intended words through your machine or she might feel that you are absurd for thinking about the pain of a break-up on the same plane as the pain of a death and she will think that you are too dramatic or serious.

The prospect of exposing the hulking, chugging machine to some of the people who've known me the longest has somehow grown in my imagination to the equivalent of revealing that all these years I've actually been spying on my friends and family for the CIA. As if they'll puzzle, "This is what she's been up to all along? I really don't know her at all." It's ridiculous, I know. And, in most cases, I imagine an example of how I underestimate people.

But the point of this post is that on the train home from work this evening, I read a chapter of Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones in which she writes about having accumulated a copious amount of old notebooks filled with her "complaints, boring descriptions, and flagrant anger" and how when she was considering throwing them out, a friend said she should hold on to them. Instead Goldberg left them on her friend's doorstep and, upon returning from a weekend trip, her friend told her, "I've been reading your notebooks all weekend. They are so intimate; so scared, insecure for pages, then suddenly they are not you - just raw energy and wild mind. And now here you are - Natalie - in the flesh, just a person. It feels so funny." Of the experience, Goldberg writes, "I feel good because I don't care that she sees how I really am. I'm glad. I want someone to know me."

The paragraph made me think about that time my brother read my story and instead of saying "I liked it" or "this part was funny" he said "this is my sister . . . this is how she thinks." And I realized how much I had wanted him, or anyone, to read something I'd written and understand something new about me, to know me, even if only from a silly passage about making strawberry jam. And I also thought of how, when I started this blog, I sent the link to my sister, my friend Sarah and J with a note, "In an effort to get myself writing and keep myself writing, I've started a blog. I figure the point of a blog is for someone else to read it, so you guys are the chosen. If and when you have time of course. Eventually I may share it with others. For now, I'm timid."

About two months later J and I went to dinner with Sarah and her boyfriend. Sarah brought up specific posts that she'd enjoyed, asked me if I'd thought about trying to polish any of them up for submission. J took rapid gulps from his water glass and offered an ambiguous affirmation of my explanation to Sarah as to why I blogged under a psuedonym, "It'd be bad if anyone from her work stumbled across it." After dinner I asked him if he'd ever logged onto my blog. He hadn't. Not once. In that moment, something told me it was over between us. Our relationship had always been tumultuous. He was hurt by my reflexive insensitivity. I was discouraged by his knee-jerk judgments of other people. So many things seemed like obstacles, but I'd always believed we could hurdle them. But I realized then that, two months before, I'd sent him an invitaton to tour the room in my brain that I only entrust to a select few and he'd tossed it like the Weekly Shopper.

"I felt like it would be an invasion of your privacy to read it," he said.

"But I invited you."

"I talk to you everyday. You should just be able to tell me what's on your mind. I shouldn't have to go to your blog and read it," he said.

"It's not the same. It's about the writing. You're missing the point."

"I'm sorry if I just don't have time!"

"You're lying." You didn't care. I don't know why, but you didn't. I don't understand why it feels like this is so important, but it does.

On the train today, reading another writer's - a real writer's, a published writer's - words, "I want someone to know me," I finally understand.

Funny because it's sad. Sad because it's funny.

Last night J and I saw Wristcutters: A Love Story at the Chicago International Film Festival. In the opening scene, the main character, Zia, cuts his wrists, drains his blood into the bathroom sink, passes out on the tile floor and dies. Next he discovers that a special afterlife exists for perpetrators of suicide in which everything is "pretty much the same" as their old lives, "only a little worse." His job's a bit more mundane, his apartment a bit dingier, the streets, the stores, more bleak. His new roommate berates him for eating the last of his cottage cheese, throwing the empty container at him while he lies in bed. "I've considered killing myself again," Zia tells the audience, "but I don't want to end up in an even bigger shithole than this."

The movie was tragic and hilarious and, as is true in the best of things, the tragedy is tolerable because hilarity is stirred in. And, in my opinion, vice versa.

After the movie, J and I had crepes for dinner and fell asleep watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live. In the morning I elbowed him in the chest while half asleep because he was snoring. "Jesus! You just nailed me with your elbow!" he blurted next to my head. I apologized when I woke up an hour later, consciousness and conscience intact. We made love and he said, "That's one area we've got figured out. Working toward a common goal."

After showering, he needed a clean t-shirt and said, "Did you take all my stuff out of here?" looking into a drawer of my t-shirts and socks, no longer mingled with his.

"Everything's in grocery bags in the den," I said with an unintended laugh, "Sorry."

Later he carried the bags into the living room and the handle ripped on one, splitting the bag down the side, his kelly green sweater and black Stax Records t-shirt spilling onto the floor. He piled the bags and loose clothing onto the coffee table. "Do you have a garbage bag that I can just shove this stuff in? These paper bags are shit."

I dug through the cabinet next to the refridgerator and brought out a stockpile of plastic grocery bags and fancy boutique shopping bags with ribbon handles. "Here. Let's put 'em in these," and we set about digging his sweaters and jeans and socks out of the the paper bags and dropping them into various smaller bags.

"Here. There's more room in this one."

"Those pants will fit in here."

"Half my wardrobe's here, I guess."

"I know."

Eventually we began to chuckle, him handing me boxers I'd washed and folded carefully into paper bags weeks before on the day I knew we'd break up. Now we divvied them into tidier, sturdier bags for him to carry out the front door, unsure when - if - he'd be back. I'll put that one in here. You put that one in there. Purposeful. Loving. Working toward a common goal. "This is really sad," I said, laughing hard now, the corners of my eyes wet, "And funny, too, I guess."

"It's kinda nice like that."

"It is."

It is. Somehow the humor cuts the sadness, but I'm relieved the sadness is there. I enjoy goofy entertainment as much anyone, but light humor dissolves in my mouth like cotton candy. Dark comedies stick in the throat like a thick, warm dumpling. Like the film from last night, the morning was funny, hopeful, strange and sad, catching in my throat, assuring me of its substance.

Thanks for your kindness, but you're all making it really difficult to self-destruct.

On Sunday there was the waiter at Yes Thai who returned to the table with extra napkins and a sympathetic smile after I'd welled up while ordering the Crazy Noodles. On Monday it was writing class, where I received surprising, encouraging feedback from the instructor and classmates after reading my personal essay and, before bed, a text from Jen: JST CHKNG IN. U OK? On Tuesday it was Pilates and Truc, who drove from the city to the suburbs and back again to stay the night with me, arriving at my apartment with flowers and a vase just as I got off the phone with Angie, who'd called from NYC to make sure I was doing okay. Today there was lunch with Sarah who always knows exactly the right things to say about relationships and love and loss and who told me how "stylish" I looked in my tall boots recently resurrected for autumn. Now it's the kind condolences from readers of this blog and the discovery that not one, but THREE blogs have recently added me to their blogrolls.

Pilates, writing, thoughtful friends and fellow bloggers? When did I adopt a lifestyle that makes it so difficult to fall completely apart? Seriously. Where's the intense self-loathing? The overwhelming feeling that washing an apple and eating it would be too optimistic a gesture? I'd counted on losing 2-3 pounds this week alone on the Depression Diet. This isn't going as planned. I blame the massage.

Knot Today

A tip: Don’t get a massage on the day you plan to break up with your boyfriend.

Because rather than breathing deeply and savoring your pre-massage cucumber water, you will sit on the maroon chaise lounge next to the spa products and think: Fuck this cooling cucumber water. And fuck this soothing soundtrack with its gongs and chimes and crashing waves and monks chanting. Fuck those fucking monks with their bullshit inner peace. I feel like shit today and I want it that way.  And if I hadn’t booked this massage two weeks ago, when I still believed that I was a person who deserved to have the knot that resides under her right shoulder blade worked out, I wouldn’t even be here. Fuck the fucking 48-hour cancellation policy.

And when Mark the massage therapist asks, “How’s the pressure? Is this okay?” as he kneads the skin into the muscle into the bone you will say “Yes. It’s fine,” but what you mean is: Who cares, Mark? What’s the point? What’s the point in your working out that knot because I’ll just go back to work tomorrow, performing the same repetitive computer-tinkering motions, and the knot will be back by the end of the week. I’ve gotten massages before; the knot always comes back. What’s the point in temporary relief? And all you will really feel is where the cushioned head cradle is getting wet around your eyes and you will want the hour to sprint forward because you were in pain this morning, waking too early with puffy eyes, and you were in pain when you called your sister and she came over with big coffees and a croissant, and you want to be in pain again. You know its coming. What is the point in temporary relief?

And when the massage is over and you have dressed and slicked your ponytail back into place, now oily near the hairline, Mark will say to you, “I was applying a lot of pressure. You have a high threshold for pain.” And you will think, We’ll see.

And Mark will smile faintly and shake your hand and tell you, “Take care,” and you will want to say, “No, Mark. I don’t want to.”

See, heartbreak means profanity and pain and the consumption of toxins. A therapeutic massage is not the proper opening ceremony.

Scene from a Dinner

Somewhere between the stuffed mushrooms and the bacon-wrapped dates it clicked.

"Wait a minute!" I blurted, reaching across the table for J's mango sangria, "So the girl your brother's been trying to hook up with, the one that visited last weekend from New York, and the girl you used to date who got your brother the job at the gift shop at the W Hotel are the same girl? Chaz is trying to bed W Gift Shop Girl?"

"You haven't put these pieces together already?" J asked, watching as I fished a wine-soaked apple chunk from his glass with my index finger.

"That a girl you used to boff has been staying at your apartment?"

"We never boffed. And she's been sleeping in Chaz's room. And I wasn't even home last weekend. I was in Mexico fighting with you."

"What's her name?"

"Amy."

"Amy what?"

"I'm not telling you."

"Why not!"

"Because you'll Google her."

"So?"

"So it's creepy."

"It's not creepy. It's not a creepy Google that I do. It's just a hobby."

"Stalking girls I used to date on the Internet isn't a hobby."

"It's not just girls you used to date, Mr. Narcismo. I Google guys I used to date too."

"Yeah, that's creepy too."

"It's fun."

"It's creepy."

"So you can spend an entire afternoon in the dank basement of some old lady's house digging through crates of dusty records till your fingertips are black and that's "fun" but when I want to do a little online research, suddenly I'm pathological?"

"Creeee-peeeee."

"Just tell me her last name."

"Uh uh."

"I just want something fun to do at work tomorrow."

"You're creeping me out."

"Come on!"

"Creep."

"Killjoy."

"You wanna split the flan?"