3/90, shaving, or not

We women, we fight hard to be ourselves, to look the way we want to look because we want to look that way. We convince ourselves that our toes are painted because we like red not because the man we’re sleeping with does. We remind ourselves that skirts are comfortable, not just easy to get into.

Then we become real women, worrying about real things, the things that really make inequality-- but that is another blog post. But for now, I am writing as a college student: egocentric, over- or undersexed depending, irresponsible. I am playing with the stereotypes of myself. I am looking a certain way, or not looking that way because you are. I have two jobs and a scholarship, a house and no legitimate things that I can complain about. If I lost everything, I could still go home. My family would still take care of me. I can admit this.

And that was what I was thinking when this happened.

There are moments when I find myself relieved that I am in a long-distance relationship. They are few, and they are fleeting, but they catch me a bit, hold me off my feet a bit and tighten my chest. I like to acknowledge these moments. They remind me that I am a person, a woman specifically.

It is winter and I am cold and our shower is clogged, filling with hair and cold water no matter how quickly I shower. I hop out before shaving. Two weeks passed this way. I could say that I ran out of razor blades or I couldn’t use my roommate’s shaving cream. I could say that I was waiting to get them waxed. These things are not true.

What is true is that when I moved into the proud warrior pose of my nightly (ok, semi-nightly) yoga, I gasped. Audibly. I ran my hand up my leg to make sure that it wasn’t some optical illusion. I felt my face flush. I looked around.

There was no one. There would be no one for another three weeks. No one to run a hand up my leg or graze against at the bar or lean against on the couch. “So fuck it, right?” I found myself thinking. Well there, then, that’s something. A small relief from the distance; a reminder that he would keep his distance anyway, which in a way, made him feel closer.

2/90, in the a.m.

I should know better than to wear my suede flats in January. I gave myself small up's for remembering to put my trouser socks on. I had my hat with its ear flaps and chin strap. My hands in my coat pockets where wearing gloves, though I wore my thins ones--to better match my coat and shoes.

As the split at the bend of my foot, in the middle of the plastic strip that serves as the sole of my shoe, began to fill with snow and cause my flat foot to roll over and twist a bit, I started watching each step a bit more carefully.

This is how I noticed it. The flimsy, plastic tube of lipgloss, its screw-on cap a bit to the side like its neck was broken. I could still tell what color it was; it hadn't been on the sidewalk before the snow fell. Bending a bit, I saw the silver flakes mixed with the strawberry tint. I knew that at the store, it had been labeled "frost," and this seemed appropriate.

I thought of freezer pops, the rows of connected sugar ice that fill the freezer each May and are found later, in November maybe, while packing extra turkey away. I thought of the syrup loosening between your fingers as your crunch the plastic between thumb and index.

I stepped on the tube, expecting the same crunch, similar to the feel of the snow balled where my arch should be. Or I expected the cap to shoot off from the stress of the cold and the force of the fluid.

Nothing happened. I licked my lips, dry because I'd forgotten my chapstick, bleeding a bit at the corner from biting against my shivers. If it was not frozen and it was not cracking and the cap was on, how long had it been here? How long is too long when the cap is still on? How long is long enough to kill the germs from its former owner? How many people would see me pick it up and put it to my lips?

Several. I walked on to my car and dug the snow from my shoes, watching it melt into the mats, beneath the accelerator.

the writing

While listening to my professor do a reading of her work, I was reminded that I am not a writer. I am not a story-teller. I am not a speaker. I am a beginning; I am at a starting point. And to now, my life has been cushioned by parents that are still together, a fiancé that loved me years before I thought anyone would, a small town where people didn't talk about their problems unless everyone was already talking about them. I felt I had nothing to write for. Nothing to write about. Nothing of consequence to share.

There is a quote that has followed me for the past few years Raymond Sokolov said of Norman Mailer in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count." It lines the inside cover of my Moleskines, has been on various Post-it notes taped to desks, and lives on a permanent Sticky on my computer.

A conversation with a good friend this week circled around our writing habits. How was I surviving without a creative nonfiction class? How was she keeping on task with her low-residency program? What did we think of the Poets & Writer's top MFA programs list? And each of these questions brought us back to the same struggle we'd been having with ourselves.

How do we tell stories?
What does is mean to tell someone a story, and what meaning do these stories have?

"I write pretty," my friend said. And I knew just what she meant. I too, as Nabokov said, "caress the detail, the divine detail." And in showing my reader the exact path we will be taking, in painting the floor under their feet and filling in the air we are breathing, we become lost. We see the scenery clearly, wander a bit, looking and touching and smelling, but what is the final feeling? What are we left with? I struggle with telling stories. I describe scenes; I create a place or feeling or if not feeling at least a sensation.

Today, while eating blueberry pancakes and drinking too much coffee, my ethics professor challenged me and a fellow student to not only write, but publish our writing on our blogs, every day for 90 days. He reminds us that it does not matter if it is pretty or cohesive or part of a larger whole, because as Sokolov said, it is the writing that will count. We will write and we will post until our writing becomes our breathing. We will tell stories.

And so I am challenging myself, beginning now, in this moment. That here, for the following 89 posts, I will tell my stories. I will limit my language, pace myself, move the reader through a narrative, no matter how short. Because if we don't share, what happens? If we don't write it and shape it and become something, then there is nothing.

So here I go--deep into myself, to find the story I've started.
But I'm not go alone. I'll be helped by:

Telling True Stories, a book that I found listed for another journalism class (I'm sure that me buying it from the bookstore meant someone actually in the class couldn't. I'm over it.)
Malcolm Gladwell
Brevity, which first turned me to creative nonfiction in a real way
Creative Nonfiction
and of course, my professor Brad

I wouldn't care if they were

I like the mornings like these, where I begin with a bit of oversleeping, followed by eggs and productivity, followed by getting distracted when a beat makes my foot bounce.

And then the bouncing takes over. And my hair whips back and forth, my hands punch the air, my eyes watch my knee-high argyle socks bounce across the floor as I dance like no one's watching, because they aren't and because I wouldn't care if they were. Not today. Not when there are still 15 hours before sleeping to make the day go right.

the guest house

The couch, with its quilted pattern of hearts and stripes, came to us from the Salvation Army. This is not exactly accurate. It came to us be the Salvation Army cannot refuse donations, even if they are too horrible for the store. When I first moved into my collage rental home, my roommates and I couldn't refuse donations either. When my fiancé offered to donate the donation to us, we didn't know what we were getting into.

The couch, by some divine grace, couldn't fit in our home. It was taken to the garage, but its companion love seat was placed in the center of our living room--another story entirely.

Since moving the couch to the garage among the two portable grills, the broken desk chair next to the wooden shelf, the cabinet of old gardening supplies, we have wondered what Hemingway-esque homeless man takes refuge here. There have been instances, like the found bag of potting soil and VHS of The Rescuers, or the disappearance of my great grandmother's gardening shears, that have proved his existence.

After Christmas break this year, I returned to find the parking pad (read: lawn) behind my house a boggy pit. I decided, for the first time since moving in a year and a half ago, to use the garage. It is small, built before SUVS, and I could not close the door without crushing my trunk. I didn't consider this a problem, since the "normal" not-garage door had been missing since we moved in.

On my way to mass, in the rain and the early winter dark, I lifted the car door handle to turn on the interior lights, helping me find the keyhole. Something shifted in the cushions of the couch. For a moment, the scenes flashed before my eyes. Would I attack him while he slept? Would he charge at me in a stupor, carrying the bag of cans I often saw in our alley? Would he flee only to be run over as I backed the car out at full speed? My hand was trembling. The key was skidding across the red paint around the key hole, leaving an erratic path.

I hopped in and locked the door, turned the key, let the lights come on and waited. And then I saw him.

The large feral cat, who I had quick possibly caught taking a nap after eating the pugs that bark at the fence across the alley. I thought, Hell, I wouldn't blame him if he gobbled the barking, huffing pups. I thought, Yes, this is more frightening. I thought of rabies and how much force it would take to break a charging cat's neck. I thought maybe, until the mud dries up and the ground settles, I'll park along the street.

this is; i am not

I realized I was really dedicated to this whole getting married business when I wanted stainless steal pots for Christmas, when I wanted to trade my car in for a Prius, when even thinking about listening to the Velvet Underground with Nico made me cry, when he drove back to graduate school and I counted more than 500 days just to know what we were waiting for.

Now there are less than 200 days, and more people than I expected thinking that marriage at ages 22 and 25 is young, irrational, based on an institution, a type of conformity, a loss of independence found only by living alone. And I disagree.

There are times and days where I cannot reconcile myself to the disconnect between emotion and rationality. Days when I am furious at my inability to clarify how the hugs goodbye and the months apart made us sure that we needed more than regularly messing around or weekly going out for dinner.

I need to know that when I turn the coffee on in the morning, he'll be there making sure I let it cool before sipping it. I need to know that when I forget my shampoo by the sink, it will be his hand that reaches through the curtain to hand it to me; that my wet fingers will grab a bit of his thumb when my hand wraps around the bottle.

I need to know that when my statistics courses have covered the café table with formulas and workbooks and Math Camp forms, when the rejection letters come, when I forget a form for our Visa applications, when I walk down the aisle, it is his hand at the small of my back, holding it just enough to let me know he's there.

There are the practical reasons to be married. The shared income, rent, cell phone plan; the person holding you responsible for buying three espressos in one day; the married status that helps us bum around Europe longer. There are the religious reasons to be married. We want to live together. We want children one day. We value the strength it takes to say yes it is you and I will share what I am with you. We value the compassion it takes to say I love you, and this is what I am not. You have seen this and you care for me anyway.

Then, there are the real reasons. There is the fact that, no matter where I could live on my own, what I would see on my own, how I would exercise on my own, I couldn't be on my own in the way that I am with him. I would not push myself to publish. I would not remind myself that to better the world, I must live for others. We would be, as he has said, hollow.

And I accept your denouncement of marriage, your need for independence. And I embrace the freedom of knowing that we will make it There together, wherever there is on whatever day. And I look forward to our plans to stay young together, to share a too small place together until the next phase of our five-year plan--and the throwing away of these plans when moving to Europe is possible, when I'm admitted to Harvard, when he is more than adjunct faculty, when we feel it because the feeling of his hand at the small of my back is all I need to know the next step is the right one.

apple

While you chew the last bite of oatmeal and it burns behind your lungs, you push the medicine cabinet shut. It is at an angle because it is old and because you will not fix it and because of these things your head is cut off and your body stops at the curve where your legs begin. You think, well this wouldn’t be so bad, really. And you admire the flatness of your stomach when the air is in your chest, but you are afraid to let it go, sink to your bellybutton, remind you that you are and Apple, not a Pear. You think, Soon the oatmeal will make this happen. You think that you’d better not where the shirt so tight. You’re going out for lunch in a few hours. You’re reminded that once, you ate yogurt for breakfast and peanuts for lunch and your cheeseburgers without the bun. You remind yourself that this is better, that your weight is a Woman’s and soon you’ll want children. And you stop breathing a bit at this, not holding it in your chest, not dropping it to your belly. Feeling what it means to have nothing there. You breathe again and think of thin, Parisian arms, then look at yours.

this year, again

What I started this post to say, was that my birth control pill is caught in my throat, dissolving like a Cherry Tylenol. I wondered what this meant, how it made my taking it three hours late worse. And then I remembered what I was feeling.

I have failed. This is part of the new year, this whole acceptance of my smallness. The fact that the blog will not have followers, that it is for myself, that my writing here is a way to hold myself accountable, to prove to myself that I can do it. And here "It" is.

I am tired. I am still chewing on moments of my past six months that I know are the times I will one day say we made it through. I am coming to terms. I have been writing it as fiction and disseminating the information and loosening my attachment and saying this is what I believe, this here, this moment of perception, this way that I feel defines me.

When asked what my foundation is, where I rest on issues and what defines me, I find myself a feminist, a socialist, a firm believer in the desire to help a Society that is failing, because if I don't help who will and what am I living in?

I accept this. That is what I am doing this year. In the resolution to do yoga, to pick this blog back up for myself and post to la francofile for ourselves, to write To Aim for instead of To Do, in all of these things is my acceptance that what I really want is peace.

I want to breathe and appreciate it. I want to aim and accept that there will be time tomorrow to finish what I attempted. And if there is not time tomorrow, then what the fuck anyway? I started this post to say that I was choking on protection. I began typing this blog to say that I will again be typing on this blog with a regular irregularity, which actually mirrors what I was going to write about, the choking and all. And then I wrote this blog, and I ask for your forgiveness in this meta piece that is a confessional, like the true Catholic I am in many ways, a reminder to myself that I am trying. And for the first time, I am happy to be not-quite-making it, not all the way.