Text Messages From This Single Girl’s Friday Evening

A: Season 1 of Golden Girls was only $13 at Target!

K: aaand this is why God put us together.

A: That and scrabble.

A Progressive Journal Entry: The First Day of Vacation

August 10, 2009

San Francisco, California
In a coffee shop at Irving and 7th, 11:30 a.m.

“I awoke to city sounds — gardeners cutting plants next door, the N-Train halting and moving on, people calling to one another across the street, cars honking, sirens. I thought I was living in L.A. again for a few seconds, until I realized I was lying on a green sueded couch, and the sun shone through the old-fashioned windows. Leah had already left for work. I heard her heels against the long, wood hallway, softening out the door and down the steps in my half-sleep earlier that morning. It felt so good to roll over and bury my feet deeper in the pocket I’d created at the bottom of the blanket. Upon waking two hours later, I was tempted to check my work email. I felt OK about checking it last night because it was still the weekend — not officially my vacation time. Upon looking at the eagle stamp icon at the bottom of my Macbook, I felt a tightness inside. I closed the top of the laptop. Perhaps I was right — perhaps this vacation is much more necessary than I previously thought. So, I wasted some time on Facebook. I texted with some friends and accepted road trip music advice from the most qualified expert I know — my roommate Kat. I showered. I called a friend and gave him the advice he’d solicited while I put on my makeup, sitting on a large pillow in front of Leah’s mirrored closet door. I packed a purse, locked the door, and two blocks later got my feet newly pedicured. Now there’s an iced coffee and a cranberry scone sitting before me, gradually disappearing. My handwriting is messy, the breeze through the open door moves my feather earrings against my face.

“A second ago the man next to me looked as if he would say something. He had a book entitled The Infinite Jest in front of him. He caught me eavesdropping with my eyes. When he stood up, I wanted to say, “You’re going to leave without even saying hello?” but I didn’t and just watched his muscular calves walk out the door. The girl outside the window saw me watching, and she smiled at me. I smiled back. I liked having this joke with her. I am thinking about how life is a series of decisions. I am thinking about doorways and windows and how that man was probably watching what I wrote. He glanced up when I turned the page. I was aware of his eyes — eavesdropping, as mine would, later.

“I love it when I put too much cream in my iced coffee. It is a bitter, smooth milkshake.

“I am thinking about how Leah wouldn’t be in my life without having gone to college. I am thinking about my other friend who may move to Southern California — a friend I’ve had most of my life and how I’m afraid to think too much about her moving here because I will cry from happiness. She’s almost family to me. It would be so good to have that familiarity — so good to show her my world.

Outside the DeYoung Museum, 2:15 p.m.

“A lady walked by and told me, ‘There’s some panthers in the bushes.’ She’s pointing at a tiny rhubarb-ish colony of bushes in the middle of a concrete pond. All I see are lily pads, fish, and water lilies.

“It is a day for sitting and listening, a day for noticing shapes and textures, a day for examining face and expressions, and for finding new ones. I am tempted to go see the King Tut exhibit — a re-visitation of legacy and things passed away, indeed, something to behold. I was tempted to face a fear and go to the natural science museum, to gaze into the faces of dead things on display, their fur preserved for the speculation of the viewer. But today is a day for being here, for capturing moments as they happen, for absorbing the present instead of inquiring about the past.

“A baby strapped in a carrier against her dad’s chest moves by and points at me. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. She wears a pink dress, and her feet just hang there, over the safety straps. She says something which cannot be translated, a noise of wanting without articulation. She knows what she means, and we don’t. Maybe she sees those panthers in the bushes. “

Excerpts From the Journal In the Past Few Weeks

July 31: On Family Reunions

Twelve years ago we went to the same place, in our small family camper, laden with snacks and beach towels and Alan and me in the back, sprawled among books and card games and his guitar. I can’t remember if we brought the dogs? I don’t believe we brought the dogs — I don’t remember the smell of their breath or them jumping up on the seat to poke holes in my papers with their claws. I wonder what my parents thought of me then, two blue eyes hidden behind glasses, the oversized Christian band T-shirts, the face covered by an open book, or the wordless mouth as she silently scraped a pen across paper. It’s funny the things I remember from childhood… I don’t remember that exact trip per se, but I do remember a series of trips, a mashing of all those summer road trips in the back of that camper, at least ten years’ worth of that humid, enclosed smell, the sand ground between the yarns of the brown carpeting, the hollow click of those cupboards locking shut, or how the side camper door always popped open two blocks into the drive.

August 4, 2009: On My Brother

Last week my brother texted me for the first time in the history of The Order of the Clipperton Siblinghood. “Is your guitar in St. James?” he wrote, which may seem unremarkable, but this is not the first guitar under my possession after which my brother has innocently inquired and quietly stolen. The last was my bass guitar, which is now rumored to be “doing church work among the needy.” I told him, “My guitar is in California, WITH ME,” and then I told him he’d have to come get it. He lives in South Dakota. Sometimes I am perplexed why we find one another so funny. For example, on Sunday, excited at this new prospect of my older brother finally setting aside his cravat and knickers and stepping those wooden shoes into the 21st Century (a few weeks ago he got a Facebook, A FACEBOOK! And now he’s painstakingly typing out text messages — TEXT MESSAGES — with his sadly uncoordinated thumbs), I sent him a text mentioning the man I have chosen as my future husband, a man I have spoken to a minuscule amount of times, but love telling my brother about because it’s funny to play with his protectiveness. I texted my brother, in all the glorious and silly ridiculousness, and I will not say what I said, except that my brother replied, “I will throw a hot dog at him.” I do not know what possessed my brother to make this promise. I do not know why he thought it was so funny. I do not know why I laughed so heartily, where I lay poolside, startling the lady next to me out of her magazine. He will throw a hot dog at the object of my Google searches, and oh yeah, the object of my undying affection, yeah, that too… Once my brother bought me a Hootie and the Blowfish CD at a pawn shop for no reason. And when I was, like, 12, he sold me a Michael W. Smith CD for 50-cents. Then in high school, one night when we were driving home from youth group, he told me I was good-looking. We were in a band together, a little coffee shop ensemble, and we thought we were very important. People came to drink coffee and hear our songs, mostly out of support, no doubt. But what was really important about all of it was all that time we spent together, melodizing, writing those lyrics, making lists and singing the same songs over and over again, fighting over when to hold practices, him pushing me to learn the bass, all that. Without ever saying it, he taught me that I deserved to be heard. I deserved to find someone who considered me in pertinent decisions, who made me laugh, and listened to me stumble over notes and chords. And who would patiently endure a hot dog ambush.

August 5, 2009: On Communion

I am thinking about the sweetness of the grape juice, and that moment after the pastor had blessed the sacrament, and all the people reached over to put the cups in the little circle holders on the back of the pew. The plastic made a clickety sound in waves throughout the sanctuary, after all the reverence was over.

Wyoming or Bust… Literally.

This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous, but right now I’m having a hard time with the idea of being away from work next week while I’m on vacation. I mean, I’m so excited about the vacation, but there’s this part of me that wants to be in the office, so I can be in on all the exciting things that are happening, and so I can, you know, WORK.

What?

The thing about it is, I know this vacation is necessary. I know that the pace at which I’ve been working isn’t healthy, even though achieving things gives me such a high that I will never have to fear a drug addiction. Forcing myself to get away for a while will only recharge my batteries, batteries which are probably dying without my even noticing, because I’ve been, well, working. Because I love my job. This past week, my co-worker and friend LR and I have been talking about burn-out and what that looks like for people who work in the nonprofit industry. It probably creeps up on people pretty quickly. Nonprofit employees are typically understaffed, overworked, and so passionate about their cause, so focused on it, that they just keep pushing through the brain’s red flags. Two evenings this week I have come home and taken 2-hour naps. I just fell asleep, right there, no warning, boom. “I don’t know why I’ve been so tired lately,” I told LR yesterday. “It’s because you’ve been working like a crazy person,” she said. I think that’s my body telling me it’s time… YOU NEED A BREAK. The tasks at hand will wait until you get back. Just go. Just go.

The other thing is that I’m sad to miss the Wednesday night group I’ve been attending. I’m not sure what to call it… it’s like a Christian support group where we get together and talk and grow in community and worship and study the Bible and pray and stuff. I love the people here. It’s such an eclectic group. It’s been such a blessing to be part of it. I’m also sad about missing church. I am sad about leaving my roommates for a while and putting my growing friendships on hold. I know it’s only a week, but I’m just really loving life right now. I want to bask in it while it lasts. And I am sad about not being able to work on my tan much this weekend. Yeah, you heard me: TAN. Who knew it was even possible for this Minnesota girl to get a tan?

At the same time, I get to see Best Friend L tomorrow and the fam soon after. It will be awesome: A welcome break. I won’t entirely be able to put work and Southern California behind me, though, until I get on that plane to San Francisco tomorrow.

One Week To Vacation, OR Hello, Dude Ranch

Things to Take On the Journey:

- a best friend

- snacks (carrots, grapes, Cheetos, chocolate chip cookies, granola bars, Pringles)

- water

- mix CDs

- cash money

- clothes

- cowboy hats (brown for L, pink for me — or maybe blue?)

- jeans that are old, which will potentially smell of horses by the end

- a bathing suit that will not fall off in the event of water skiiing

- a razor

- some shampoo

- pajamas, you always forget your pajamas, and it will be a problem on all vacations until your honeymoon

- PAJAMAS (please remember your pajamas because you and L will be sleeping in the same bed)

- maps

- sunglasses

- cowgirl boots

- a dress for Sunday

- your singing voice

- short stories to read on the road

- underwear, 12 pair and a few extra for good measure

- sports bra to keep everything close during horseback riding

- sunblock as an investment in the future 40-year-old face

Things NOT to Take On the Journey…

- anything resembling work (this could be a problem when it comes to the pajama pants)

Denying the Melancholy

It Never Rains In California

We met in the summer, and it’s summer again, three years later. It’s easier to remember the feel of a warm body close to you when the sun seems to wrap around you just like that. It’s not that I regret the decision. It’s not that I ever doubted that the separation would force us into that transformation we both needed — it stuffed us into our separate cocoons. But I still hear songs, sad songs:

I’m like the wind in the canyon
I’m there then I’m gone in a second
You’re growing older in peace where you’re at
I wish I could be there for that
But I’ve moved on
Like a rolling stone
In a crowded room
I’m alone.

I’m not going to stir up the past (much), nor do I wish to write about broken relationships over the internet, nor is dwelling on my own mistakes and shortcomings a welcome diversion at this early hour. But this point in summer does leave a girl sort of reminiscent and melancholy. There is that feeling to it, that sense of past somethings boiling in the heat, remembering those magical feelings in the beginning, so full of promise and anxiety when neither of us knew where we would end up. I’ve ended up in so many places since then, but only two really matter tonight: With him, Without him. Two and a half years with him, six months without him, or is it seven now? Some days it feels as though gangrene got to one of my limbs before the antibiotics could. It festered before amputation. I screamed and bit a pencil when they sawed it off.

For a while I thought about him every day, there were rages and fits of tears, grasping and flailing, long moments of silence, the awkward conversations where I said too much, the social situations that would have been so much easier if he had been there. We were good in social situations. We were vaudvillian. He warmed up the crowd with his brilliance and charm, I came behind with my wise-cracks, and oh, friends laughed. This next part is the part I shouldn’t mention, the part about a place I couldn’t reach, a place within him where no space existed to fit the curves of my body.

For the longest time, I wondered why I stopped longing for him to love me. I figured it out. So, for the past six months, I’ve been in hibernation. This thing has been blocking my voice. In India, I sat on a bed and cried with my friend — I was grasping for something familiar in such an unconventional place. I felt out of control and dug for the places I’d once found control, in the peace of acceptance, in knowing that someone had rooted for me for nearly three years. But the peace wasn’t in that place anymore, and I cried because I couldn’t picture him there with me, the angles of his face blurred in the heat, the hottest summer heat I’ve ever known. Our California summer is nothing in comparison to India. I blurred into everything around me, and it blurred into me. He was gone.

He was gone because I broke him, and I swept him away. I did many wrong things; I said many bad things; I made him feel things he didn’t deserve to feel. He did the same to me. And so it goes. It feels like a baby must feel in those violent moments of being expelled from that safe, dark womb. It’s cold. The oxygen burns those lungs.

But I’ve moved on
Like a rolling stone
In a crowded room
I’m alone.

Do you remember how those crowded rooms would watch us, to see what funny thing we’d do or how we’d say something to make them laugh and all the times I slapped your face when you didn’t expect it and you’d make all those misogynist jokes just to see what I’d do? Do you think about all those times I kissed your dimples or the knuckles on your hands or connected your freckles with my fingertips? Perhaps the only thing that binds us now is the problem of what to do with these memories. I cannot leave them behind, nor will I take them with me. Summer is too hot for extra things.

Before I came to where you were, to California, when the whole country stretched out between us, you’d tell me how much you missed the rain. “It never rains in California,” I’d tell you. “You should have known before you moved there.”

I’m like the rain in a downpour
I wash away what you long for
And I wave goodbye with the sun in my eyes
But I wish I could be there tonight.

On Being Nearly 27

An excerpt from a letter to my pen pal of 6 years (not 6 years old… we’ve been writing to one another off and on for 6 years):

“It is late — 1:30 a.m. — and I laid in bed for a long time before clicking on the bedside lamp again and accompanying the gentle tick of the ceiling fan with the scrape of pen across paper. These are the sounds of thought, of sorting out, of seeking peace and absorbing silence. It’s been a long week, a week in which I have come to a few conclusions and thought more about all the aspects of my life that would be more comfortable if I could find their conclusions as well. I like to think, that since I am generally such a good sleeper, that the times sleep fails to conquer me are really moments of spiritual awakening, where God is trying to capture my mind to tell me something deep and wholly sweeping, that He will reveal something to me that will make me look soulful and integrated and holy in the eyes of my peers. Tonight, however, it seems that there’s no getting around the fact that I just ate sushi too close to bedtime.

“I do have a lot of thoughts, though, as this is the first evening this week that I’ve had a chance to sit in silence and think over the past few days’ events. Indeed, a lot has happened. When I decided it was time to get involved in events outside work and find community and rediscover having a social life, I didn’t realize it would all fall on me at once. I went from guarding my alone-time like a Victorian guards her virginity, to scarcely being able to find enough alone-time to process my days. So, I’m losing some sleep and writing to you because writing to you always has a way of putting my mind right.

“I am thinking about men lately, thinking a lot about marriage, and praying about my desire to have a man, to be married, and to do everything that goes along with marriage (wink). Eventually I would like to have some babies. I have never really thought much about this until the past few weeks, when the desire is manifesting itself because next month I will be a 27, and my body keeps reminding me that it’s ready. It’s prime time for baby implantation. It’s time to incubate an organism.

“When I really think about having kids, about raising them, about the reality of labor (and stitches after labor… ew) and diapers and vomit and screechy little voices, I’m all, “SHUT UP, BIOLOGICAL CLOCK,” not to mention all the obstacles that come with marriage, like having to keep air freshener beside the toilet, having to clean up all those little stubbled hairs all around the sink, rolling over in the middle of the night and coming into contact with hairy armpits, and, oh yeah, compromising your life in order to meld it with someone else’s. Exercising selflessness. Having full, unconditional, overflowing love for someone. And having to exercise that love consistently.

“Isn’t it bizarre how much we want these things, even though they have the potential to hurt us, to make us uncomfortable, to push us to be the best and worst versions of ourselves? The strategic part of my brain sorts through all the possibilities, seeking out the one for my future that will be best. And even though the cons for the case of marriage and children come neck-and-neck with the pros, it’s still right there at the top of all possibilities, a possibility that I, for the first time in my life, am having to lay down and let go of every day. I hope for that life. I want to struggle through it with someone I love, someone I’m crazy about. I want to be in a position where we have to manufacture our own brand of happiness together. I want to be a wife.

“In other news, I’m considering restricting all men under the age of 30 from my list of dating prospects.”

Cultural Commentary

A: There’s something weird going on with a lot of the older men I meet in Orange County. It’s this weird cultural thing like they see younger women as conquests or something. I constantly feel like they’re hitting on me.

L: I know! They think we’re impressionable. They want to conquer us and buy us plastic surgery.

A: We’re not just impressionable. We’re physically malleable.

Coming Unstuck In Time

We flew into the night, right through the sunrise, up into the clouds and over them until the floor was white and the ceiling extended forever, across the world in all directions, blue. India would be just over the Atlantic, on the exact opposite side of the world. It didn’t matter if we flew over the Pacific or the Atlantic. We could have gone in either direction, into the sunrise or into the sunset. Either side was the same distance. It all led to the same place.

On the plane, I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and thought about the past and how the future always leads to thinking about the past. Before leaving my bedroom, I grabbed the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut because its small size packed nicely. I didn’t even know what it was about, and then I read the back and thought it would be a funny contrast to read about World War 2 and Dresden while traveling to India on a business trip. But really, the book is about the past, and how the past relates to our present and future. The narrator writes, “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much of it was mine to keep.”

How much of India would be mine to keep? Now, four weeks later, so much of it is sliding away, now that my car and my bed and the beach are my culture again. I awake each morning and get clean. I drink the water from the faucet. But before, on that plane, all I could think about was what was to come, instead of what had already happened. As the clouds moved below us and the darkness swallowed our small plane, with its bright little windows all in a row, I read Vonnegut’s description of a war veteran who has sustained incredible loss and heartbreak, a man who he says has “come unstuck in time.”

When I was a little girl, I used to lie on my grandma’s living room floor and imagine what it would be like if we flipped the house upside down, and everyone had to walk on the ceiling as if it were the floor. The chandeliers were centerpieces, the arches doorways or little gates, and the exposed wood grid was a practical format for furniture arrangement. What would have happened if gravity had unstuck itself, and the house had actually turned upside down, and things had turned opposite, like the way the water spins down the drain on the other side of the world?

Now that several weeks have passed since my return, I have struggled to put into words my experiences in India because they transcend so much of what I formerly understood. It is a relief to find people who have been there, who know how drastically different the culture and the mindset and the relationships are, and yet how they are very the same. It is a place of paradoxes and opposites to us Americans, a place that is terrifying in both its ugliness and its beauty. I saw life, and I saw death. I touched it. I laid my hands on it and prayed for it. I say it, life and death as singular, because in India, life and death often seemed so intertwined that they were the same. The only way I know to describe the experience is to say that we came unstuck in time.

Vonnegut’s narrator launches into a story within his own story, about a war veteran named Billy Pilgrim who goes on a radio program to talk about his experiences. Billy Pilgrim believes that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967, from the planet Tralfamadore. He was taken there and displayed naked in a zoo, and there he mated with a former movie star from Earth named Montana Wildhack. Billy Pilgrim says that the most important thing he learned on Tralfamadore is that when a person dies, he only “appears to die.” On the radio program, he says, “[A man] is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadores can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadore sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadores say about dead people, which is, ‘So it goes.’”

I had heard so many stories before going to India, so many instructions on what to expect, what not to expect, and to expect the unexpected. My friend and co-worker LR told me that once you get to India, you realize that all your senses have been on mute, and suddenly they switch to full-volume. This is true. She also told me that you cannot go to the places she has been and return the same. “You can’t see this and do nothing,” she said. This is also true.

We spent most of our days seeing the India that tourists do not see. Now that I have returned, and strangers hear about my job, they often say one of two things: “I’ve always wanted to go to India,” or, “You must feel so good about your job.” I believe that most people want the Vanity Fair version of India, full of dancing girls and Taj Mahals and elephant rides. I also do not feel good about my job. I love my job. I am incredibly thankful for it and terribly humbled by it. But I do not feel good about it because human trafficking and slavery are overwhelming and dark and prevalent, and it’s so damn hard to know that these things exist, to have seen the faces of women who are manipulated and incarcerated and robbed of freedom, hope, and dignity. It doesn’t matter whether or not I feel good about my job. Our organization is so tiny in comparison to the problem. In one place we stayed, there were an estimated 10,000 prostitutes in one square kilometer. We’re helping about 68 in all of India.

Still, seeing the difference in those 68 compared to the women we saw who are still working the line was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It is as if I knew their faces before I got there, before those moments that I actually saw them — those present moments that instantly became past. And now that I’m home, it feels like their faces are still out there ahead of me, somewhere in the future waiting for when time will again unhinge itself, a big open door, or another horizon waiting to swallow up a different plane.

photo by friend AA