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.”
Last night I went to a ’social media party’ and became acutely aware of the fact that I suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder. I stood in the middle of the Grand Hyatt with my glass of wine and looked around anxiously, trying to find someone to talk to but not really wanting to talk to anyone anyway. I don’t know how to be normal in large groups of strangers. I can never come up with the right thing to say; I can never come up with anything to say. Sometimes I wish that when you met people, the culturally polite thing to do would be to give them a hug. I think we would all feel more relaxed in social situations if conversations began just after we threw our arms around each other.
Keep reading…
It had been almost three months, but I still couldn’t help looking in his medicine cabinet.
I wouldn’t say that I went into his bathroom with that as my sole intention–I really did have to pee!–but as I was washing my hands an internal debate raged. “Do it!” someone on my left shoulder said. “No! Don’t be so pathetic!” someone on my right shoulder replied, disgusted. Feeling helpless, I listened to my left and popped open the medicine cabinet as I ran the tap, hoping the gushing water would overpower the noise of my snooping.
Inside there were a string of condoms that had come from a box he and I had bought when we were together. I know this because they were the same kind that I have buried deep in the back of my top drawer. “He is using these to have sex with someone else,” my right shoulder whispered. “So are you!” retorted my left.
I only had the cabinet open for approximately three seconds. Like a gruesome roadside crash, I had to look, but I couldn’t look for very long. I had to look, but I didn’t want to see.
Our first date lasted three days. Before leaving my apartment to meet you, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my hands were visibly shaking. It was 11pm on a Monday night and I had class the next morning at 9am. “What am I doing? This is so out of character for me,” I told my roommate while smoking a cigarette by the living room window. There was a diagram taped to my bedroom door. It looked like this:
When I was 20 years old I was young enough to believe that it was still possible to invent new ways to love, ways which no one else in history had conceived of before. Lying in bed with my Macbook at night, “long distance” seemed like a concept that had lost its definitional punch. What was distance but a physical longing, one that we could now abate by a simple click of the keyboard? When I was 20 I had more faith in Skype than I did in neck kisses.
In the beginning long distance was easy: our veins lay out quietly like cables beneath the sea, transcontinental passages for messages to strike through. I woke up as he was coming home from work, our internal clocks ticking in mismatched rhythms, and we were happy every day. We sang Joy Division together on the telephone. “My mother thinks that you are pretty, too pretty for me,” he said, “and that this will surely end badly.” But he had the softest hands!
Keep reading…
This is the story of me ruining someone’s life, but then finding out years later that that’s not actually what happened.
In The Things They Carry, Tim O’Brien writes extensively on the limitations of memory, how malleable the nostalgic narrative arc can be. Two people’s experiences of the same event are rarely the same, and years later, the way they remember them may render that same event completely unrecognizable. I was reminded of these sentiments last weekend when I called up an old friend I’d wronged and asked him to tell me in detail all of the awful things I had done to him.
It’s a long story that would read too much like a Gossip Girl script, but in short, Alex was one player in a series of relationship mistakes I made over eighteen months of my college life. The mistakes began with Daniel, my sophomore year boyfriend, and ended with Alex and the third figure in this story—Zach—driving his car into a wall at 50 miles an hour with Alex in the passenger’s seat. The three men were friends, and through what I can now only chalk up to something akin to female witchcraft, I managed to make those eighteen months as painful and messy and upsetting as I could for all four of us. I have a cruelty inside me that mostly lays dormant, and is on the whole a subconscious part of my personality, but at times it rises to the surface and wreaks havoc in ways I can’t comprehend until months afterward. In this instance I had fallen in love and gotten my heart broken by Daniel, then strung along his best friends, Zach and Alex, to a point where we were all literally going insane. That is, at least, how I perceived the narrative of those eighteen months in my own mind.
Keep reading…
I have this theory that every person in the world has a finite amount of love that they can ration out to those around them, depending on who they like the most. If someone we really, really love comes into our lives, we have to love someone else less in order to give that person their deserved helping of our love. I guess that’d be the downside. The upside is that when someone leaves our lives, we get to redistribute our love to people who may have been missing out on it while we were focusing it mostly on one person. My cat, for example, has been incredibly spoiled these past few weeks.
Please feel free to skip this if you (understandably) don’t give a shit about my life and you just want to watch YouTube videos or read about journalism or somethin’. I don’t really want to make a Heartbreak Soup #2, so you’ll have to bear with me while I work this stuff out.
While I adored the book, I thought LOTR director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones skewed too far cheap thriller for me to actually ever pay to see. Unfortunately the trailer appeared before every movie I went to see last semester, as well as every episode of “The Real World: DC” that I consumed. There was always one quote that kind of got to me, despite my general abhorrence for the film itself. While trying to parse the line between life and death, Susie Salmon’s younger brother points to a cerulean space drawn between the earth and the sky and says, “Susie’s in the in-between!”
For the last 10 days, I myself have been living in the in-between, teetering somewhere between life and death. During the days, I force myself to live. This takes a lot of effort, because at night I basically allow myself to die. In the mornings I wake up and drink coffee, I go to work and answer e-mails and do homework and take the subway. Sometimes I even eat. At night, I lie in the dark and I cry until I’m exhausted. I will time to move faster, but then realize that it doesn’t matter—when I wake up the next day I will feel the exact same way: empty.
I am alone again.