I said, “I am looking for the love of my life.” My friend nodded and pulled on his cigarette. “You are too young to be looking for the love of your life,” he said.
I want someone who is scary-smart, someone who hand-writes me notes and leaves them beside my morning cup of coffee. I want someone to bake for and to moan for, someone who sneaks up behind me in the kitchen and puts his hands over my eyes and I can tell by his smell that it is and always has been him. I want someone who doesn’t care if I stay up late writing in bed, whose face lights up at the sight of small children, who can make impressive literary references without appearing pompous, who knows in which spots I’m most ticklish. I want someone brave, someone who makes me brave, someone worth surrendering for.
I do not want someone who is neglectful of text messages, who sleeps with other people and doesn’t understand why that might bother me, who does not offer to pay for dinner even though he knows I’ll refuse. I do not want someone who secretly thinks Tucker Max is funny or uses the term “slut” with honest conviction. I do not want someone who fiddles with his phone during conversations, is uninterested in reading or does not want to hold my hand but insists on kissing my collarbone.
Today is your 33rd birthday. We aren’t supposed to speak but I call you anyway to make sure you’re okay. I say, “Happy birthday,” and you say, “Thanks, I’m surprised you remembered.” I am in one of those long, dark passages that leads between BART and Muni stations, and there are Blackberry ads posted to all the walls that read, “Closeness has nothing to do with distance.” I say, “Of course I remembered, you know I’m good at things like that.” With those two words–”you know”–I accidentally betray the intimacy I feel for you. You know the small things, which are the things that matter most. You know how I scrunch my face when I cry and the way my shoulders heave when I write; you know that I embarrassingly can’t sleep without white noise, that I get drunk after only two beers. Someday someone else will know these things about me, but for now it’s only you.
Last week you went to Amsterdam without telling anyone, leaving the rest of us to quietly worry stateside. I imagine you wandering in and out of dimly lit coffeeshops astride the stone bridges and canals. I imagine that she went with you, her head dropping to your shoulder as she slept soundly on the flight. I imagine that you both got high in a park and fell asleep on a giant hotel bed with an art deco quilt. I know what it’s like to be in Europe with someone you love who doesn’t love you back, and now I imagine that you do, too. On the phone I ask if you are having a good birthday and you say, “Yeah, I really am,” and I imagine that she is sitting there beside you as I speak hesitantly into the phone, trying to mask the slice of my voice that shakes when I realize how much I miss you.
On our first date, Sam’s car got towed.
We had just emerged from seeing Inception, during which he had not tried to hold my hand even once. I’d let it sit invitingly on my knee the whole movie, even though it was freezing and I was tempted to tuck it beneath my thighs the way I usually do when I’m cold. I wanted him to know without me saying anything that if he decided to hold my hand, I would be okay with that, because first dates are hard and people should make it as easy as possible for each other. The suspenseful plot of the movie had made me paranoid, but in truth his lack of forwardness terrified me more, launching me into an internal debate over whether or not my hand was holdable enough.
It was late when we left the theater, so the fog had rolled in heavy and unrelenting, clinging to the tops of buildings and making the high-rises look like lopsided cotton swabs. As we walked further down Mission and deeper into the Tenderloin, the world appeared ever more dreamlike: like in the movie, this was a dream nested in a dream, and Sam was leading me deep into the recesses of what every local blog deemed “the most dangerous neighborhood in the city.”
When I talk to the people I love these days, everyone seems to conjure the same word to describe how they’re feeling. A lot of people say they’re lonely and a lot of people say they’re scared but every single person tells me that they’re lost. Even the people who have jobs, who have apartments, even the people who did not pick up and move 3,000 miles and whose lives after graduating have ostensibly stayed the same. It is so strange to realize that I knew who I was four months ago but suddenly I don’t anymore. It is so strange to have gone through so much in the past few years and yet feel as emotionally stunted and bewildered and adrift as I was at 15.
The thing about college is that it’s such an unrealistic life experience that for four whole years it allows you to propagate the illusion that you know who you are. You meet new people, you buy new clothes, you try new drugs. You get drunk all the time and bruise your shins in alleyways and you fuck people you can’t bring yourself to love and you talk to ‘intellectual peers’ about really important topics like the inherent dangers of groupthink and The Way We Live Now. All of these things aid in forming a sense of self that is satisfyingly solid, at least compared to the ping pong nature of your high school self. College is about figuring out who you are, but I had no idea that image I worked four years to construct would be so easy to lose.
This is for the Rec Writer’s Club subject “All of This Has Happened Before,” and borrows structure from Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly.”
You kissed me in July on a set of flannel snowman sheets. My hair was wet from the swimming pool. Your mom was downstairs, drunk at 2pm. I thought, “This is just like kissing a window.” I told one person and you told everyone.
You kissed me in school when we were supposed to be in class. We were never in class. When the bell rang I wasn’t relieved, just nervous. I kissed you in my Dad’s car. The cops were polite when they caught us with our clothes half off. They promised not to tell. We made promises just to break them. You kissed me on your bed while our snow boots pooled water in the foyer. I thought I loved you but I was 17. Every day was Casimir Pulaski Day. You smelled like Dove soap. We were always getting caught, but never minding.
My sister and I have always been opposites, but whether or not we are opposites in spite or because of each other is something I’ve never been able to figure out. I sometimes worry that the person I grew into took up so much room in our quiet life that my sister was forced to grow into the places I left empty. From a scruffy sapling I shot into the sky year by year, unfurling wildly, branches chaotic and menacing. Smaller, subtler, ever more empathetic, I worry that my sister felt she had no choice but to simply stretch out where I left room for her. It’s that way with sisters, or at least it always has been with us: we intertwine and grow apart and collide. We fight and leave angry, half-moon shaped nail marks on the back of each other’s arms–but then we find a reason to make fun of the way our Mom laughs (I want to invent an adjective form of ‘hyena’ just to describe it) and get back to watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
My sister was captain of the field hockey team, and I was layout editor of the yearbook the year everyone proclaimed it “too artsy.” I was Alice in the 8th grade production of “Alice in Wonderland,” and she was…Ali Roy–no need for acting, her own name, its three-syllable rhythm cascading with verbal ease, carried enough cache on its own. I got grounded time and time again for exposing my PG-13 exploits on various blogging outlets (Xanga, Deadjournal and Livejournal), and she got grounded for attending the popular kids’ parties. Everyone knew we were siblings, but we looked and acted so differently everyone also probably thought one of us was adopted. She inherited my mom’s tan Portuguese glow; I am pale, freckly, embarrassingly Northern European.
There’s a difference between not expressing something because you don’t want to and not expressing something because you can’t. Language is how we communicate, it’s how we apply meaning to experiences and share things so that we don’t feel like we’re living isolated in a vacuum. In short, it’s how we relate. This is a list of experiences, feelings, places and people for which we don’t have a specific word. Some of them are obscure, so it makes sense that there would be no one word assigned to them. But others are so universal in their humanness that it’s very strange to think that in thousands of years of language we’ve never figured out one clear-cut way to express the sentiment. Add yours to the comments, and maybe some day when we’re feeling clever we can come up with words for everything on the list.
At the airport, in high-ceilinged rooms of glass, all I see is people leaving each other. Outside the sliding doors of the check-in desk, where people climb out of cars, struggling with their luggage, they look at each other with an earnestness reserved only for the final moments you share with someone you care about.
I’ve observed almost all of the various styles of airport goodbyes: the enthusiastic “See you soon!” as arms fling hopefully around sagging shoulders; the casual handshake and curt, jaunty wave; the drawn out, meaningful embrace of long distance lovers whose bodies have already begun training for how to be alone again. Being together apart takes practice and a distinct knack for calendar organization. It’s funny that to love someone from afar is cowardly, but to love someone from far away is startlingly brave.