“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Kurt was right, you know. It’s hard to notice those times, because you’re so consumed at the time with enjoying them, but every once in a while you notice that nothing is wrong and everything is perfect, in a period of time anywhere from an instant to a month, and you have to sit back for a second and smile absently and love indiscriminately.
It’s February now. The months go faster now, and it’s not because they’re marked by rent checks.
I want to acknowledge that I will include right now, this exact time, as one of the happiest times in my life. Suddenly it smacks me right across the face: the amount of friends I have right now. The support system I’ve slowly but surely constructed around myself. The casual acquaintances and close friends that I’m so dearly attached to I don’t even notice.
All I’ve ever wanted was to be a part of something. That’s what my Chinese New Year zodiac says, and it’s rather true. And something I’m a part of—so many somethings. The “that’s what she said” jokes that make us giggle for thirty seconds. The dancing we do around the office to Blink-182. Living in “The Greatest City on Earth” while young and healthy and charming. Drunken nights out and sober nights in and vice versa. All little circles overlapping, a giant Venn Diagram at the center of which I sit, bewildered but glad.
That said, last night was a crying night. No matter how wonderful everything else is, if you like someone and they don’t like you back, or don’t like you the right way, it seems to outweigh anything you can put on the ‘enviable’ side of the scales. Why? How can that be?
I have a friend who flew home early from Florida yesterday, and came out last night. And this girl, this girl that he loves (though of course he wouldn’t use that word why is everyone so afraid of that word it’s not a commitment to anything except to earnestness) doesn’t love him. She doesn’t even like-like him—because in this respect is anyone older than 12? No one that I know.
He’s so upset. And I can’t do a fucking thing. None of us can. He said, “The thing is, this has made me realize how many friends I have. And no matter what, that feels like the consolation prize.”
And I said, “I know. But it isn’t. Having people who love you no matter how you look or how upset you feel or how much of a bummer you are to be around: that’s it. That’s the whole deal. That’s not the consolation prize. That’s the whole prize. That’s…that’s it. That’s the best you can ever hope to get.”
So, in trying—and, alas, failing—to convince him, I convinced myself.
So, ok. I don’t have anyone in love with me anymore. I don’t even have anyone who wants to sleep with me and then have a conversation with me. But I have It. The “consolation” prize, which I guess that it kind of is. Because it’s more consoling than any relationship I’ve ever even started to have. Sometimes ‘everything but’ is nearly enough and someday I’ll learn to live with that.
A friend said there has to be one place, eventually, that you don’t run away from. What if there isn’t? I think, every day now, of Portland and of New York and I wonder if going back I would be running to or from. What if it’s a surrender? What if that’s ok? What if I can’t ever be happy anywhere, because I’ve been happy too many places?
Every time I know that I need to go back home, if only so I can leave it again, something reminds of the life I have here. This is the first life I’ve made all on my own, from scratch, and that will make it the hardest goodbye yet.
When I was younger, even as recently as a year or two ago, I thought I would live as many places as possible. Now I find that the weight of all the people I can’t pretend I’ll ever see again is breaking my heart and I’m not sure I can bear to make any more places home. Still, desperation tends to strike all of a sudden, with an all-but-irresistible urge to cut off all my hair, to get a tattoo, to get on an airplane, to join the Marines, to do something drastic because this stasis is not in my DNA.
Am I explaining this right?
The only thing that I want more than to stay here is to be as far away as I can get with a single plane ride.
Halfway through the first day in Portland, I started to feel like I was going to cry—because it was during that nebulous period consisting of anywhere from a specific six months to my entire life, where I felt like crying all the time—but I didn’t and I went and laid down on the bed with the door open and listened to Maggie playing for my mom the songs that she’d written on the ukelele. Maggie is my youngest sister. They were good songs. The melody sweet and the lyrics insightful and her voice crackly but appealing. My mom liked them, and Maggie had a certain shyness but mostly not really. And it was clear, you know how you can just tell those things?, that this was something they had done before, a thing they do sometimes, a common interaction.
My mom left, and Maggie came into the room to play a song. While she played I finally started to cry but she didn’t notice until she was done. I was crying because while I was away my sister became an artist and my little brother became a teenager and my littlest sister grew into the poised graceful beautiful human being she has always been and because they have a routine, there in that house I ran away from so fast, a quiet little life for the three or four or five or six of them, depending on if you count the sister who moved out or my mom’s new boyfriend or my aunt who stops by everyday. But they all have created a life and I’m not in it. People you love are always changing while you’re away for a year without even the courtesy of an email to warn you.
And when she saw that I was crying, Maggie lay down on top of me, and stroked my hair, and kissed my cheek, and told me it was ok and I’m the Big Sister, I was supposed to figure all of this out before all of them, but all I can do is be their weepy little sister and let them take care of me and they do and don’t mind because they’re kind and generous and have a surfeit of love.
I guess I was crying firstly because my siblings became wonderful and talented and good people that I don’t know at all, and secondly because I hadn’t become a person at all.
This was a couple months ago. But, God. I wanted so much to be a part of their family again. I want to be a part of the life they made.
I have decided—fuck it all, I’m going to be a happy person again. I was, not so terribly long ago, a kind person, an-almost-constantly-laughing person, even, sometimes, a sweet person. Currently, I am The Worst. I can’t promise not to come back with more stories about crying. I’m saying that slowly, with determination, I’m getting back to a default mode of happy.
Let’s go back to talking about running and tequila shots and the various things to which you can effectively add avocado.
Another night that begins wonderfully and I suddenly turn sad and men on street corners say to me, “Don’t cry, you’re too beautiful to cry,” and I want to slap them. I want to apologize to everyone I’ve affected but it doesn’t matter. That’s not how it works. I’m sorry, and they know, and that’s never quite enough.
Instead of strangers this time, it’s a friend who was outside for a smoke, sitting on somebody’s stoop in Soho. She puts an arm around me and I can’t hold it in anymore and she suddenly realizes I’m not laughing but weeping.
At the point when my whole face is covered in tears, she cradles my head in her hands and kisses me lightly on the cheek then the temple and it’s such a forgiving, big-sisterly act that it simultaneously breaks my heart and fixes it. The tiniest of things to her, 15 minutes out of a single night out of her entire life, that I spent sobbing while she hugged me, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
I wake up the next morning on another friend’s couch, covered in her cat’s hair, the TV is still on and MTV is showing Uptown Girls and Brittany Murphy is kind of totally charming in that movie and we watch and wait until the last possible moment to get up and shower before work.
Everyone I know has huge hearts and kind eyes and true warmth and I am cold and prickly and impossible to love.
