on time

Suddenly when there is nothing left to do, I'm at a loss. I don't sit still well. Tremors grow up inside of me and they eat at my appetite and they empty my lungs. And my legs are tired and my eyes are tired and I want to do, but I don't remember how to do. Suddenly I feel like I've lost my best friend and like I've missed a million chances in life and I've forgotten all the things I was going to do if I had a moment to myself to do them. I think it means I'm afraid. But lord how being afraid is a dreadful, dirty feeling.

It's like that time I was camping at Caesar's Head and I hiked down into that gully and tried to start a fire with all that damp wood. And the sun was setting and the car was a mile away straight uphill. And the fire wouldn't start and I panicked as I imagined it getting dark, how all the raccoons and skunks would come and maybe bears and I'd be all alone and hungry and terrified. Every time I tried to get the fire started it just ate more of my kindling and I had to go collect more and it was all wet anyway and I was cursing myself for being there in the first place. And then I just sat down on a log and sobbed. I rubbed my filthy, smoky fists in my eyes to stop the tears and they just burned instead. Then finally I sighed and took a deep breath and collected another load of kindling, and suddenly from nowhere, I had a nice little fire going, just before the light of day was gone.

That's it, isn't it? I think maybe I just need to sit myself down and have a good cry.

making believe

I love those little moments in life when I forget I'm an adult with a whole history, when somehow everything boils itself down to exactly no more and no less than what it is. Here I'm not talking about those moments when the setting sun hits the clouds with a light that fills me with hope and longing, or when the trees loop and bend and fill me with this sense of wonder that such magical things are possible. I'm talking about those moments when I suddenly forget I'm not a little kid playing make-believe. Last week I was sitting after hours in the office of an account manager who was proofreading a final draft of an ad for release, and something about that moment made me feel exactly like I was in the front hallway of the house on East Madison Avenue, pretending the hall table was a desk and my sister was my colleague in some office in which we did some undefined brand of paperwork. Maybe it was the way the light in her office was crossing her desk, maybe it was her long blond hair so much like my sisters' hair when we were kids. Maybe it was a rare and fleeting mindset of forgetting to take my job seriously. But suddenly I wasn't a 33-year-old woman making bank and deciding to quit my stable job for a new and more promising line of work, worrying about the effect my childhood fears have on the way I relate to men, but instead, I was just a kid imagining that these things were important and needed to be done. It wasn't a conscious remembering. It felt more like waking from a dream into the morning. These moments come from time to time: hearing my nephew's friends call my sister "Mrs. Lymper" instead of Carolyn, going to bed early and settling into the covers thinking, "someday this is how it will be when I'm grown and have a room of my own," or riding my bike home and catching the smell of someone's potroast and wondering if it's past bedtime yet or not. It's a sudden pop and a clarity and then I'm delighted and surprised to remember who and where I am now, and I giggle a little to myself. As if everything can always be just so simple as make-believe.

John

It's funny that I want all of them. I want a garden of boys and men to cultivate and grow. Perhaps I should have married young and had five sons and lived in a household of men. I want to talk to them in the morning while I pluck their dying leaves and encourage the buds. I want to sit in the evenings and admire them until after the sun goes down. I think I have never been with a man I haven't been in love with on some level, who I haven't wanted to keep forever.

I don't remember meeting John for the first time. Johnny we called him then. I remember sitting in Renee's dorm room and looking through her pictures from home and coming across one of him and saying, "Who. Is. That." He was her friend from home who went to NYU. NYU, I thought. Too good for me. But so very beautiful to look at. I'd pick up the album every time I was in her room and flip to that page and just look and sigh. But I don't remember meeting him. I remember she told me he was coming for a visit and I remember getting nervous and picking the right clothes and probably getting very high to calm my panicked shyness. But I don't remember the moment we met. I remember the first time we sat in the backyard together, and he pointed out that we were both wearing torn jeans and tie-dyed shirts. And thinking oh goodness he's not too good for me, he's just a dork like me. Maybe worse than me. And then I remember for how very long we were in love.

It was a comfortable, strange sort of love. We stayed constantly by each other's side but I was guarded. He was my best friend and sometimes we kissed or made out, but I felt always annoyed by him. He wore his heart on his sleeve. I wished he wouldn't do that. Everytime I got hurt by another boy I'd run back into his arms and I was comforted to have him, but annoyed that he would have me back so easily. I thought the love was too easy to be real. So I scorned it. Always he was in love with me. I always knew he was there. And so always I kicked dirt in his eyes for loving me and beat him down for being there. I didn't know then that I was so very afraid.

When he decided he was going to move out West we got in a fight about it. A very theoretical argument. He said he didn't love New Jersey because the people weren't as open as he thought people should be. And I said if you don't find love in a place you should put love into that place and make it beautiful, not run away to some imagined garden of milk and honey. Two days later I went down to Philly to see him play, and one of his new songs sounded so familiar to me. But why should it be so familiar? He's never played it before. Then he wailed out, "oh girl I'm going away for a while," and I knew then it was familiar because it was the very argument we'd just had. He was singing to me why he had to leave.

After he'd been in New Mexico for a while I flew out to visit, not him, specifically. My brother had moved there with him, along with a handful of our friends. All the boys. They lived in a pack then, as we girls did. One did nothing without the rest of them. I slept on their sofa in Santa Fe and got annoyed at the way he smoked all the pot and ate all the food and wouldn't put in his fair share for anything. I was annoyed at the popping sound his lips made when he dragged his cigarette, the smacking noises when he chewed. I was annoyed at the mess he left in his wake as he moved through the house. I wasn't in love with him then.

We went for a drive one day, just he and I, for hours down a dirt road through a desert. We were looking for a fabled place he'd heard of called Two Peaks, or Three Peaks maybe, where he could trade some crystals he'd found to some jewelry-making commune hippies for Really Good Weed. We never found it. I thought maybe it was a metaphor for our relationship, a long winding search for a place that didn't exist. We passed over the bridge outside Taos where Quentin Tarantino filmed the wedding scene in Natural Born Killers. I was sad that I didn't want to stop the car and marry him.

Then later he moved on to San Francisco. He fell in love with a 22-year-old lesbian. He was moving out to marry her. And I was so angry. By then it had been a good eight or so years that I'd known him, and I shouldn't have been so surprised that he'd do something so romantic and rash. I didn't know then that I was angry he'd finally fallen in love with someone else. They never got married, John and the young lesbian. They've since broken up and though I thought he'd move home after that happened, he didn't.

And now it's been so many years since I've seen him, and he's moving on again, this time to Portland, Oregon. I'm hoping to visit him in August and I wonder how it will be. Old friendships never die, and I know it'll be just like that, just like yesterday when I see him again. And I'll cringe when he pops his lips on his cigarette, and I'll feel warm and frustrated when he hugs me and tells me it's good to see me. And I'll wonder as I always do how things could have been different between us, if only this or if only that. And I'll blame myself for not being capable of love and we'll laugh and we'll talk about the old days and we'll talk about how beautiful life is now that we're old. I'll leave with a sad smile and tell him I'll see him when comes home for my brother's wedding in the fall. And I'll drive off missing him still. As I always have.

a great cathartic exhale

After I got to know Brian, I was sure he was it for me. He was who I wanted to end up with. I felt comfortable with him. I felt like there wasn't anything I couldn't say to him. And every time he walked into the room, I felt a big rush of many small somethings that made me believe if he'd just put his arms around me, I'd be home, after so many years. I didn't need romance or courtship. I just wanted to love this friend I'd found. Then he let me down and I was sad, and as it goes with me, sadness turned to anger and it was a long time before I could be friends with him again.

In the meantime I met the scientist. At first he felt like a silly fling, because we were incomprehensibly incompatible. But then as things progressed and fell away and built back up again, I thought, I must have been daft to think Brian was it. Comfort suddenly didn't seem to be enough. The scientist was so very romantic, giving me small gifts, and cooking dinner together with wine, and riding on his Vespa up Kelly Drive for ice cream. Finally one night while dinner was in the oven, he asked for help making the bed, as he'd just washed the sheets and hadn't had time to put them back on before I came by. As we stood there across the bed from each other, smoothing the wrinkles and tucking the corners under, I thought, "I could do this. This is easy. I could really be with this man." Only hours later the whole thing shattered and I was alone in the back of a cab speeding back to South Philly, crying and holding my phone between my hands and begging it to ring.

And spending the next several months asking myself what it is I really want. What I have been waiting for. I still don't know.

Today I read a wretched article that on the surface attempted to explain away the phenomenon of casual sex, making small arguments about the empowerment of women who focus on their careers before they settle down. But the whole thing shook with an undercurrent of condemnation. Or maybe the shaking was in me. As if I'd ever had a career to focus on or an empowerment behind my checkerboard past. I felt massively misunderstood. This article seemed to be telling me I've failed in more ways than I'd previously imagined. There are so many places I made wrong turns that taking a straight path no longer seems like the norm to me. But it is.

Someday I'm going to write it all out, beginning to end: the mistrials brought by low self-esteem in my younger days, the multiple failed attempts in my mid-twenties to reclaim it and make it my own, a miscarriage of logic over and again, and the moment I fell away from the logic altogether and discovered how it is just to feel without struggling against myself. Now I have a sudden desire to explain myself, to make myself right with the world. I want them to know how grossly I misunderstood love in the beginning, and how much clearer my understanding is for it now. It used to be hard not to hate people who haven't suffered. Now I just want them to see, so that I can open up without fear of judgment, because that fear is so real inside of me, still, and it burns up inside of me with every new pair of eyes I look into. In another life, maybe I could have. Or maybe in this life, maybe I still can.

it met me on the subway

I was waiting for a southbound train with Ali, talking about high school, and a girl sitting next to me overheard me and turned to me and said, "You're from South Jersey." And we chatted for a bit and quickly she felt like family to me. She was from Pine Hill, just two towns over from mine, and I kept thinking and saying how rare to meet someone from the area. It's shocking that it should be so uncommon. My hometown is not a half hour by car from Philly, and there's a train there that runs straight in, and yet, I never meet people who are from where I am from. I meet and know plenty of people from Jersey, from South Jersey, even, but not from Lindenwold, Clementon, Pine Hill, Stratford. They're backwards towns, is why. This girl was fully ten years younger than me, though she looked my age and has a son old enough to take on the roller coaster. But she had grown up where I did and she had left as I did, and in ten minutes time I saw that she sees things the way I see things. Through the eyes of my zip code, my demographic. People don't see things this way. People from the city may, but then they learn that I'm from the suburbs and they draw a divide. People from the suburbs catch an inflection or the tail end of an accent and they, too, draw a divide. I'm from a different place. The heart is big but hard to find. The pride is strong but short. And I know it's why I hold my brother so tightly, because he's the only person I know who can remember, who can understand. Even my sisters, because they grew up in a different time in our family, where there was pain and shortage but not neglect. Even my high school friends, because I went to a Catholic school far away and they lived in better towns. I grew up in a ghettoized suburb and I'm always ashamed to say so, but not because it is a shameful place to start. But because in this generation, the disease is the need to exaggerate one's humble beginnings. So I won't say so. I keep it to myself most of the time and when I do share, I know the people I'm sharing it with can't empathize because they can't fathom, though they may try. And so, this afternoon, what a delight. What a wonderful, surreal meeting on the train. A woman who knows me though we are strangers. Even in small places, this world is so big to make me a traveler in a foreign land. It's nice to remember.

confound this night

Tonight I started nervous. And I know now it's because I didn't know what would come of it, and something inside of me knew it would be a confusion. This night kept shouting at me, remember! Remember! As if it wanted to me to think of all the ways I've failed at love and all the ways love has failed me. Every face I saw was a story from my past: remember how he lied to me, remember how I wouldn't let him take me seriously, remember when I put my heart on the shelf for him, remember that I was never good enough for him. And so I drank like it was going to save my life until it dulled the din, and I fell into myself, and finally the night was silent. And then in the silence, the night began to whisper to me in a different voice, remember, remember... Remember the plans this world has for you, and the plans you have for this world. Remember the quiet places, the dark places, the angry places, the places love needs to be given. And I remembered. How I know my heart will open, the ways it wants to give, to whom my love will be given. And now I know there was a purging, a catharsis, a forgiveness, and a remembrance I would do well to hold tight.

into the past

I took the 23 bus home today. I passed some friends out the window, sitting outside at Tria, drinking wine, probably waiting for a cheese plate. Then I missed my stop, and saw M out the window, walking down the street with a friend, off to get a beer at Lucky 13, I'm sure. I wondered if I stayed on the bus, who else would I see out the window? Could I see all my friends and past lovers, in reverse chronological order, going about their lives while I sat still with my grump and my tote full of wine? Might I see the lawyer next, with his shiny blond girlfriend, and then maybe the scientist, chasing down a dream he can't figure? Maybe I'd see Byck mid-anxiety attack, and John, and Mike, and so forth until there was...who? Who came first? I wouldn't want to go back to my teens, but maybe I'd stop at twenty. Maybe at the last stop on Bigler Avenue I'd see Vince. Not Vince now, but Vince as he was then. Vince at 22, with his crystal blue eyes and his thick black hair, his silly sneer.

I remember the very first time I laid eyes on Vincent. I was crossing the lot behind the grease trucks back in Brunswick. I think I was with a sister or two, and we were going to a party. He was crossing the other way and I stared him and swooned and collapsed into myself when he looked at me. Then when I saw him at the party I thought I'd die. I was so quiet then, so shy and insecure. And my sister knew him. He turned out to be the boyfriend of her very best friend, a girl I'd looked up to for her confidence and beauty, and knowing this was her boyfriend made me admire her even more. I didn't meet him that night, and I don't remember how I met him, but some two summers later maybe he started working where I worked. And I followed him around like a puppy dog. I was 19 or 20, and he was two years older, and he was beautiful and he was in a band, for goodness' sake, he was untouchable. He took an interest in me, maybe a little flirtatiously, but I knew it was because he was friends with my older sister. He was being kind.

Then I remember the night I fell in love with him. We were at another party. I think it was an after-party to some event, at someone's house, in a tiny candlelit living room. Someone was passing around a book of poetry, as college kids will do, and people were taking turns reading. Vince took the book and flipped the pages and began, "The world is a beautiful place/to be born into/if you don't mind happiness/not always being/so much fun." He paused and I caught my breath and said, "I know this one." He looked up and his eyes snapped into mine and he asked, "You know this one?" "Yes," I said, "it's one of my favorite poems." I remember wishing I'd been sexy and romantic enough, confident enough to begin reciting where he left off, but I didn't. And he continued and when he got to the line, "dancing," he looked at me again, and said what a perfect line, what a perfect poem.

I don't remember how Vince and I became lovers, and I don't remember our first kiss. I just remember feeling so small around him always, thinking he was so much bigger than this world should allow, thinking only he was being kind to me by loving me. I remember staring into his eyes whenever he would let me. I remember crying in bed with him. I remember the morning he woke up and read the poems I had taped to my wall the way a college girl will tape poems up on the wall, some of my own, some of my favorites by cummings or Ferlinghetti or Robinson Jeffers. He read one I'd written about him, and it was obvious I'd written it about him so he asked, "Who is this poem about?" I said it wasn't about anyone at all. I was so painfully shy with him, so very afraid he'd take his eyes away from me.

But oh how I followed him around. How I wanted him near to me, but I never wanted him to know. We argued one night the difference between want and need and he thought maybe they both came down to simple desire. I wrote a fairytale about him and had it published, though he never read it. The story of a young girl who fell in love with a thief and danced the night through with him about his vagabond bonfire before running away to learn to fly. I ran from Vince. I never noticed him following me too, though he did. I only ever thought he was being kind. It was so simple, even in the ways it wasn't. It was so good to have.

I don't remember how it ended between us either. I'm sure it faded away as some romances do, no great confrontation. He was never my boyfriend, and though I never asked, he told me once why he couldn't be. He said, "There's a right boy for you somewhere, but it's not me." And I cried. And I wrote more poems and I dreamed about him like I don't dream about people now that I'm grown.

Sometimes I see Vince. Once a year or maybe less or sometimes more, I see him and he looks at me tenderly with his crystal blue eyes and he sighs and smiles his girlish smile and pulls me close into a hug. He seems so old to me now, if he seems young to the rest of the world, still, and he makes me feel young. He makes me feel special the way no one else could, because we both know now what only he knew then. Somewhere there is a right boy for me, but it's not him. And we both know now what neither one of us knew then, how very perfect and untouched it was that we shared, how lucky we are to have had it.