Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

Stationary Abyss

2025-10-05T18:10:00.003-04:00

As the leaves fall and seasons change, I’m home again. Home. There’s a familial concept often devoid of proper sustenance and sustainability in a world that is constantly evolving and changing your narrative without consent. My dog and I walk, we sit in the sun, I write, he guards. The leaves fall as the concrete jungle echoes in the surround sound.

The past twenty-four months or so have been one hell of a ride. Palatable heartbreaks, unpalatable contentions, the loss of self and soul, the absence of ride or die truth sayers. The list certainly doesn’t stay static. About a year ago, my Dad said he had cancer. We had known for a few weeks before we told anyone. We knew. We thought it was lowkey, minor, just another blip on the radar. It was not. Last October, I received an award, and after FaceTiming my Dad, my friends said he looked sad. I couldn’t tell them then. I couldn’t tell them why I was crashing out that weekend. Less than a month later, urgent and emergent plans changed the way life unfolded. I finally made the call to tell someone. That turned into a colossal bullet to my gut; it’s one I’m not sure I’ll ever recover. The wound remains raw, open, and large.

Everyone says I handled the past year with such grace and ferocity. I didn’t. I hid behind closed doors and turned off screens to lose my mind, heart, and soul. Part of me went feral behind those fastened portals, never trusting and terrified to let cracks of light in again. The ferocity of the moment remains. The feral may subside, but it probably has elements intending to stay like a tattoo from an ill-fated drunken night.

Back home, the eternal churning of life and a lack of balance pervade. The writer’s block is soil crushing. The tarot spread advises me to believe and lean in, as it will unfold through creativity and expression. My expression this morning was devoid of emotion.

Perhaps I’m a little lost. I am possibly needed. Cycles of life do this to us all. Sometimes we are rife with pride and friends. Sometimes we lack a sense of self and direction while riding the tidal wave alone. These are the practicalities of it all.

As the leaves start to fall and the seasons change, I face the reckoning of life and emotions I’ve perpetually put on hold. The compartmentalization needs to be redefined, reevaluated, and resurfaced. In the end, I’ll be fine. I always am. Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause, evaluate, remember, and refine the conceptual space of self, person, and design. The stationary abyss remains heavy like a cement block chained to depths I didn't know were there, while at the same time stationary comfort brings a sense of ease to forget the lost time and emotions of relationships gone to the stars and divides of time.

Going Home Again

2025-09-18T01:48:00.000-04:00

Going home is like reversing time: an impossibility but one of nostalgic longing. It's like asking for the past to be undone, for routes to change, and for life-altering, crushing, and defining events to be discolored and morph into another reality outside the bounds of reason. The mode of memory is one path to traverse, as memory and the past rarely work in a straightforward, linear manner. A moment wrought in angst can evolve into a window of petite clarity and a hunger for more. Life is complicated and non-linear like that.

In July, I spent a week back in Seattle, as I'm from Tacoma. I've always felt more comfortable in the PNW than in most places, ironically enough, and altogether, I was there (in the region) for about two weeks. Along the way, as I exited south, I stopped in Tacoma. Curiosity consumed my soul, and a part of me needed to reconcile some lingering emotions from a youth lost in time and legal tangles. I drove, taking in the shoreline and marina, which is teeming with boats and almost gleaming in its expanded glory. The pub up the block from our old homestead on A Street is now a Walgreens, which I found ridiculously funny. My Dad spent a reasonable (or perhaps unreasonable) amount of time there, once upon a time. Standing in line to purchase water and gluten-free candy, a middle-aged man kept looking back at me with a mix of recognition and humor. I pondered how poetic it would be if it were a boy from my elementary school, but I didn't take poetic license and ask him his name. I let the dark-haired man, purchasing his beer in the hours before noon, walk away as I exhaled, trying to maintain my standing on my feet.

Tacoma was taxing.

I gazed long and hard at the old house, the wood siding replaced with vinyl, the blue my Dad had painted long since turned to a fading tan. A rocking chair sat on the front porch, and I exhaled so long I thought my lungs might collapse. My mother always wanted a porch with a rocking chair; she had a swing in Kentucky, and the Virginia house did have her rocking chair for a moment years ago. I think a storm took it out . . . or dry rot. The working-class Tacoma neighborhood still stands, with the maroon house across the street--with those boys that my brother used to hound and threaten to leave me alone--and the sidewalk I learned to ride a bicycle still remains. The cherry blossom tree, which I've long loved in memory, stands bushy and larger than life. My brother once used it for his teen escape, and these days it would serve as the perfect portal for a teenage escapee in the attic bedroom. I started school on that front walk. Mom and Dad brought me home there when I was born. Dad used to line it at Christmas to make it glow for us, and the list goes on.

Pike Place Market. July 2025.

Along the Skyline Trail, Mount Rainer National Park. July 2025.

Yet, the course of memory will fail the fantasy as I couldn't avoid knowing that the pains of mental illness were already creeping into my brother when we were young. My parents battled their own elements; life did not unfold as planned. Depression, PTSD, and alcoholism permeate those pages of my story. As I stood looking at the old house, the first of two my parents owned, I exhaled and whispered to the dead air, "I hope the new family is happy here as we were not." Driving away felt like admitting and remembering the truth of reality all at once.

Memories of bicycle rides, the wild family of boys across the street (in a house that I think hasn't been touched since we lived on the block), trick-or-treating, and friends over for dinner fell away to the long, summer day as I drove away.

The church we used to attend is still there, but it's no longer the same. At all. The courtyard reeks of urine, and transient encampments have changed the landscape. Reality of economics and life colors that city in ways we can't morally pack away. The meth clinic . . . I need not say more.

Being home again was good, as it always is. I ate my weight in huckleberries, always remembering why I rarely eat blueberries on my own and get a little sad at the thought of them. When we played all summer, those things grew like brambleweed. We picked at and ate as we tumbled through childhood days riddled with imagination and an era lacking sunscreen mandates and bottled water. Even as Tacoma, and the side of town we called home, left me slightly bereft, voyages of my youth fueled the lining of my soul. Olympic National Park and the peninsula were filled with my hiking wonder and memories of Girl Scout camping trips. These are the things that join the memories of waves and rock you to sleep at two am.

Later, my travels took me back to Oregon, where I lived for a summer in 2016. Looking back, my summer in Corvallis was everything I needed at that moment. The universe has a way of serving us delight sometimes. That was the summer I spent splunking archival documents on food and breweries. It was also one of the last before we found gluten to be a rude culprit for me. I rented a lime green bike and pedaled around town and campus, soaking in the air and sights while finding myself settling down. My nervous system was wrecked from life and a series of events that left me in survival mode and barely hanging on. The green grass, mountains, and elongated rides gave me a new sense of self that year.

The view in Corvallis. This time without Limey.

This year, as I wandered downtown, I saw how the 2019 floods affected the downtown streets and businesses. The lingering aroma of mildew hung in some areas, with water stains still faintly there along the walkway. Shops are gone, some remain, but the foot traffic is far down, and the ambiance that dances in my memory from Limey and me that year (the bicycle I rented) far outshines in their glittered memory. The yarn shop closed during Covid, I think, and my favorite of the coffee houses is still there. Yet, the je ne sais quois of the moment has passed. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Tacoma . . . or maybe it was never there. Tacoma's challenges aside, the glitter of memory does not always hold up to the test of time.

Leaving Corvallis, I sighed, remembered bike rides and some water adventures in the Willamette River. The wildflowers were still in bloom, as they had been greeting me along the drive since I'd started my six-week voyage. It's as if they were symbolism of the journey and memories of life gone by wrapped into reality. Spoiler alert: they were, especially if you've ever hiked Skyline Trail in Mount Rainer in late spring or summer. Elements of my personality seep from those peaks, and they certainly keep rising up at various spots along the way.

Organ Mountains. Las Cruces, NM. August 2025.

My final visit home this summer landed in Las Cruces, NM. I earned a master's degree there before obtaining my three letters in New York, which is a fact most people forget or choose to ignore. Once, a couple of decades ago, I called New Mexico home twice. Cruces in so many ways is the way it was back then: a mid-sized city, emerging from the desert plateau with an oasis for breeding desert rats and el camino lowriders for elongated nights on the strip. While in Cruces, I spent a couple of years basing my days around the Organ Mountains. I'd rise early in the morning, read, and drink coffee in those towers. Later, I would run in the early morning light with those peaks looking down at me, and at night, I felt like I was perpetually looking for the last glimmer of light to speckle the air around them. Not that the sun's movements fully guided mine, as insomnia has always lived within me and I'd be up at all hours . . . in my twenties, notably, as anyone past the age of 32 fantasizes about one day with the energy of our twenties. Man, what I could get done in those hours . . .

As I bemused on social, I woke to those mountains and lay down to those mountains. When I was running, I still focused on the view in my memory. The hike, one of many, took about an hour. I drove from campus up to the ranger station parking lot, doing that trek multiple times a week. Typically, I trekked it alone, and a few times my old friend Peter went up with me. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and talked about what life was, would be, and is (as we always said). He pondered then, as others have, why I was single. Pete always chipped back with "you're you, though. It's gonna take someone special and groundbreaking." I've always shrugged those comments off and tucked them away, forgetting them most days, growing annoyed when someone quips it again (almost always after having asked if I'm with someone, since I don't broach the subject). These are the good memories. There's more, but most I keep to myself. Even here.

Sonja, the Seattle friend, and I had countless dinners at The Phoenix. I say dinner, as it was lunch, but the leftovers lasted for dinner. Sometimes into the next day. So much food for 3.99 USD, and we never knew how they stayed open. They've closed now, about a decade ago, and the strip is mostly empty. The weird burger place is still there (how?!), but the landscape and feel are the same yet different, and so far away. Looking back, Cruces was always a temporary home. I enjoyed New Mexico with the dry landscapes and glistening mountain horizons, yet it never settled me or my soul. Most places haven't been, to be honest.

There is something to be said about going back, back home, and seeing what once was. For me, memories of family, siblings, and youth idle alongside the traces of mental illness and complex relationships that I still don't articulate out of self-preservation versus hatred. The power of heading home is for the poetic, I would say. It's comforting, but it certainly is discombobulating. Dad's bar is a Walgreens, friends have aged, grey hair replaces the brunettes and auburns of our youth, and the colors of houses change with the old memories there hidden away waiting for the onlooker to remember. Only those with a key can enter, and all who do aren't always welcome. Yet, the comfort of the past enables the present. Ironically, in proper form or not, dreams from a youth faded to adulthood paved the long roads to winding roads, mountainside hikes, bear sightings, and long resolute nights with silence and stars dancing through open curtains. The silence of it all, the romance of doing it all alone, seeing my past and present converge, are the lessons of conclusion, then. The ending is never complete, as the legacies we leave--unknown and known--have a way of surfacing and rekindling memories and flames. Yet, a drive through the heartland and along the Pacific coast can remind you of dreams left behind and of those still on the horizon, just beyond the sun's daily glow. The only path is to move forward and continually carve your next memory on the way there.

Ammunition and Mountainsides

2025-07-22T01:55:00.004-04:00

Two weeks into a six-week solo voyage, I finally felt my nervous system start to settle. Settle after nine months of constant alert, nine months of wonder, nine months of life on hold. Since April, my Dad's throat cancer has been clear, but the lung is being watched, and the trach had to come out weeks after the last radiation. My Mom has been holding her own. They're stable, and for the most part, my autoimmune chaos has been manageable. Mom and Dad needed me here, in the states, so I took a few weeks this summer to scratch off a handful of National Parks and a dream--long overdue--road trip I've long talked about. So, two weeks into a six-week hiking trip, I finally felt myself settle. The solitude has been a welcome relief from nights and days of endless dark wonder.

In Montana, after visiting Kansas City, Wind Cave and the Badlands in South Dakota, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and Custer State Park (SD), I felt myself settle at Glacier National Park. I've been in fight or flight for so long, sometimes barely breathing, I'd forgotten what a moment away felt like. While floating along the Middle Fork River, after I'd grueled through several miles at Glacier the day before, I chatted with a guide. I realized that two nights disconnected in a glamping cabin had nearly reset something in me.

Bison in South Dakota, a bear across the literal lane at Yellowstone, and chipmunks and pikas galore elsewhere. . . Birds have been chirping, and the sunscreen has been running low. Yet, while in Glacier, I had not one but two fucking sightings of what I clearly thought was that bastard from two years ago. Yeah, the universe is a cursed lover with a twisted humor. The salesman who sold me my Chacos... I had to tell him I was okay, as I had apparently turned pale. Damn, the voice was nearly identical. Then, I met a woman I had hiked with at Hidden Lake. Her husband, who skipped the hike part, looked like the man I once knew. All too well. The hike was lovely. The company just as much. The mountain goats, even better. Especially as one looked like a unicorn. Should have been a fucking sign.

Glacier National Park, 2025

Then again, when I left Montana, a rainbow greeted me at 6:15 am. Don't believe the damn rainbows.

Browning, MT 2025

On a beautiful Sunday, in my original hometown, a friend and I had espresso martinis downtown--after finding gluten-free cinnamon rolls at Pike Place. She took a photo of me with that cocktail, as the teal wall made my eyes pop (as she said). Little did I know, I'd look at my phone moments later to have a long email from a woman the ex was with while he was with me. Seven months ago, I got that stupid, anonymous email about women he was with while telling me he loved me. Seven months later, the week of my 49th birthday, I received a message with details I never needed to know. I thought December was a gobsmacking, bullshit punch in the face. Still, this one . . . yes, please message me the week I turn as old as my sister, having long outlived my brother and her, after months of taking care of two aging parents while trying to keep my own career going, to ask me if he still said he loved me while you were two were together.

I thought I was the only one. I believed every lie. Every. Last. One. The details are mine, but I never needed to know what he did with you, that he travelled for you, that he was seen in public with you. I never needed to know that I wasn't his main piece, and apparently, I wasn't even a side piece. I was the emotional tampon. It's all pretty deranged, especially to tell me he loved me and brought that marriage shit up. That's what it was: all a bunch of shit.

Did his mother drop him on his head as a child? If she didn't, then I don't want to know, as that's the most civilized answer I can fathom right now. Do these people want me dead? Why? What the fuck did I ever do to them, except fall for the wrong penis holding asshole ... again? About the only thing I do know is that I was never loved, wanted, or given a damn about. I was nothing more than an emotional tampon; I was a fool and a full-on idiot to believe anything thrown my way, and I don't deserve this hell of new messages every few months.

And that's what I have right now. Well, sans the weird email on my birthday that was someone else playing a fucked up game of hopscotch meets chicken. Always the fool, as we say.

I've got four more weeks, and this one I'm back home in the PNW. Today, a dose of inhaler puffs, altitude, inclines from hell, and wildflowers did my heart a punch. In time, the rest will tell.

Mount Rainer National Park, 2025.

The 2024 of 2024.

2025-01-01T22:09:00.001-05:00

An Emporia, VA sunset.

In the run of things, 2024 was one of the hardest years of my life. It began with a friend dying unexpectedly, and it ended with a new heart wound that I'm still processing. It's been dark around here these days. It's been dark for ages, actually.

My Dad's cancer was confirmed before Thanksgiving, the Wednesday the week before, to be precise. In a phone call, as he was driving home (and stopping to see my Mom), I called him, and he told me. He'd barely found out himself. Then . . . Then, I made a phone call to an old friend of mine. Little did I know that act would undo me. Back in 2020, shortly after my sister passed, I was told that when it came to the heartbreaking, bad news, we called each other . . . no more texting things like "my sister has cancer" and "my sister died." It made sense; she insisted that we call from now on. In all these years of being separated by ocean and countries, I didn't randomly call. I thought Dad's cancer was of value. It wasn't. I was told not to call again and that people have their own lives. The words still echo in my head. Of things to break me and my heart, this event is in the top five.

I know I'm not unique, and everyone goes through this phase of life. Sometimes the colors of life are vibrant, sometimes they are dark, and sometimes you are alone with no one near. But, I do think about eight hours after learning about my Dad, I was allowed to be sad, a bit melancholy, and fearful about how to navigate the subsequent phases of life. It's all unfair that my siblings passed, and even if they were here, Andy Jr. and Vinnita wouldn't have been great in this situation. It would have still been on me. Though my Mom's been in a nursing home since late June, and now Dad has taken on a level of need none of us could have predicted. He's always been the healthy one. Those who have told me to reach out these days have been kind, but I won't. Twenty-plus years of friendship are gone, and my trust level in life is down the drain. It was already low, but newer events (even after this phone call) have blown it out of the water. One day, it will all feel distant and far away, or so I'm told. There's more, but I don't reveal much as it goes. Even here, what feels like a lot is less than a tenth.

Dad's first surgical encounter came out well, but not after he hemorrhaged one night. After a week in the ICU and a couple days in the regular ward, I finally got to bring him and his new tracheostomy home. His throat and lung cancer don't prohibit him from driving, so he promptly tricked me into coffee from Wawa (it's really that good). Yeah, he then slid into the driver's seat, which--per usual--being a passenger princess with him is like skydiving sans a parachute. Thanksgiving was me driving two hours to Dad and seeing Mom on the drive back (she's halfway between).

Things got better; I finished the semester on Zoom, giving more than one lecture from the car (while Dad drove and more than once from parking lots). Dad and I did some shopping; I trolled him in public, asking if he wanted the Twinkies boxers for Christmas . . . as I held them up high in the store. Ironically, or without (we can't decide), on what would have been my brother's fifty-fifth birthday, Dad ended up at the ER. His trach needed tweaking, in this case, a new one, and not before one young doctor frightened us, thinking he needed emergency airway surgery. He didn't need surgery, but he spent another week in the hospital. It was a long night until the morning of the 24th when we learned the better news. We were all apart for Christmas, as Dad insisted I not drive to him. My exhaustion was showing, but it is what it is, as we say. We did a video chat with him from Mom's room. We survived, though.

I've had my fill of gas station coffee, and--at this point--I can tell you the best and worst of I-95 from Rocky Mount, NC, to Richmond, VA. Doing this alone is awful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I'm here--in North Carolina--for a while, working remotely, as radiation and chemo are treatments that I need to help him get to and manage.

Yet, Dad got stable enough in time for me to head back for my infusion (barely a three-day sojourn). I also needed to bring my car down since I'm here until the seasons change. We don't know which season it is yet. As Dad drove me to the airport, I got an anonymous email. It stated the names and dates of two long-term relationships my ex had while with me. The entire time we were together, years worth, he was with someone else. The. Entire. Time. We had ended again, again, in April. Things had been quiet all these months.

Just as I make peace with him and me, the ending(s) and the loss, he surfaces in my life again. This time. . . Someone blew up my peace by sending me details about him that I never needed to know. I was moving on just fine. I was making peace and finding my ground again. Yet, now, I sit here feeling more defeated than ever. To say I feel like a fool is an understatement. To say I've never felt so devastated is true. The initial shock is gone, but it is still there. I still remember how much I loved him and how much my heart hurt with the breakup (the first time). It's all replaying again and again.

Our lives have been replaying in my mind. When we were dancing in the kitchen, she was texting him. When we were lounging by the fire, he told me he was talking to someone from work for hours and hours, but I guess it was not. Instead, the message he responded to while we were furniture shopping, the text from the pub, the checking of the phone's messages when we let the vehicle's breaks cool coming down from Pike's Peak . . . when he brought up marriage, all of those times he brought it up . . . I guess none of it was real after all. I wonder which memory was just us and which was us and someone else I couldn't see in the shadows.

I guess I'm glad I didn't stay and bail on my NYC life early.

Why I got the late Christmas give of that email, two days after the holiday, is beyond me. As I said, I could have lived my life perfectly fine, moved on, and at peace not knowing any of it. I know their names and faces now. I know their locations. I now know nothing was true, and it was a lie.

It's not the cheating that's bad; it's the lie.

2424 was a year. My Mom ended up in a nursing home due to a broken leg, which led to emergency surgery (I was supposed to be in Greece for five weeks, but I came back after four for it); Dad got "a lot of cancer" as he says, I dated some in the aftermath of the ex, summer romances failed, the fall was an overwhelming stream of chaos, stress, and work, I published some, found out what's thought of me, and it ended with an anonymous email.

The year ends with a charcoal burn. At some point, I'll be social again. Perhaps.

Decisions and goals are made. They are my own, much like the demands of my life. I've always trusted little, let out little (even now), and--as life has shown--I'll stay that way.

Mom, Dad, and me after I brought him home the first time.

Writer's Notes.

2024-07-30T18:06:00.000-04:00

I've been writing again, and here's something different. Vignettes and notes from the long piece I'm finishing this week. Sometimes, the fiction we write can leave marks. Deep marks.

While in Greece I've been working on the day job and getting back to my roots and me. Enjoy the notes and windows into the next phase.

Next time I'll pull out the notes on dating again. Joy. Now there's an absolute joy, so much that at one point I forgot how to speak English at the luscious advances of an American in Greece. (Note the dripping sarcasm).

Greece has my heart in many ways, even with a stress and workload--this year--of epic proportions. I am obsessed with life here, I keep coming back, and it feels like home time and time again. Since that first voyage in 2013, when my best friend had to drag me back on the ferry to Turkey, to now when I wander Athens. I stroll along these streets with such ease, knowing this city like a glove these days, and get braver with making conversations in broken Greek. The life of design emerges . . .

***

While looking for a location name, she pulled up his address on Google Maps. The taco shop was a couple blocks away, and she needed to verify its real name and not the nickname they gave it on loosely laden evenings by the fire. Stopping for a second, she saw a different car in the drive. Zooming in, wondering if this was it, she saw the water fountain he'd put in last spring.

Casting a glance at the screen, he was to the left in a grainy image of himself, without a doubt, in the sunlit yard by the fire pit. The second dog, which he'd acquired last spring, was in the front corner. The yard ornaments still sprinkled the side and back views. She sat there with the wind knocked out of her.

The house he called their home, the one she thought would hold the two of them, that she'd spent nights and days in, wrapped up with him, dancing in the kitchen and making plans for the life she wanted. She could still see them talking about spaces and moving to a more prominent place, her sidebar about painting the porch roof to look like constellations, the order she had on eternal hold from an artist friend for a piece celebrating the two of them and where they met, the dreams of a life undone leaked from her compacted boxes of memory and hope. She'd let him slide into her inboxes more than once; he'd promised to love her.

She wasn't prepared for the reckoning of feeling undone for a love long dead. He sits there as if life has stayed static. Or maybe it had moved on. She wasn't sure. Is he waiting for her to join him? Is he pondering the loss of her? Is he relieved that she's gone? Does he even remember the life they'd planned and what was in store? She was left vulnerable, grappling with these questions and the weight of their past.

Time away

2024-07-12T11:02:00.004-04:00

How does one start the next narrative? I do not know, yet here I am.

I'm back in Greece after a blissful month in the South of France. There, I had elongated days filled with walks, stone fruits bleeding with juice, and the clicks of heels along smoothed cobblestones. Of course, I stopped in Paris for a few sunsets, and then I spent nearly a month in Aix. Knowing me as an urban dweller mainly thriving from smog and city noise, friends were keen to watch me as the days rolled by. I have a hunch a few had bets I would lose my cookies and run back to the winding streets of Paris with panhandlers and pickpockets, tourist queues, and the endless noise and complacent stress of city life. Instead, as the days lingered, I found a rhythm and solace within the small town. Vendors at the market started to recognize me; the cafe I went to for iced coffee treated me as a local after my third visit--realizing I was there a long haul--as I blundered my French, and two shop owners waved and chatted with me as our paths would cross during my flâneuring.

Provence via the train.

A full moon came. Festivals toured the town. From my fourth-floor rustic abode (third floor for my non-North American friends), with my windows wide open, I would listen to the touring sounds of summertime in the region. Medieval minstrel players touted ditties of days nearly forgotten to the mainstream eye, rock bands blared one evening for a rock festival, and a local collection of performers gave us a rendition of jazz and song one glistening summer afternoon. The days treated me with slower time and a restful nature.

Artichokes at the market.

I worked while there (and here), and yet my days in Aix were the slowest I have ever been. They remain the closest to taking time off I have done. I didn't write while there, though I did make some breakthroughs, and I taught my virtual courses. Instead of 60+ hours per week, I rolled back to 30-something hours a week. I slept without an alarm, letting the sun and day wake me--around 8 to 9 am--and letting the breeze and gentle rain tell me the day's path. The romance of it all does not escape me. I can still taste the rotisserie chicken from the farmer's market while smelling the stalls filled with lavender. I can still smell the cheese section of the grocery and market, then find its way to my fridge to linger there no matter what I did to quench the odors of fermented and gently aged dairy.

I was afraid I'd be bored there if I'm being honest. Instead, I felt my body relax to a slower pace. I didn't wake up from the silence, and I didn't fear exchanges. Sure, I had a couple of xenophobic moments, but in the end my day-to-day was delightful. My French, never eloquent, came farther than it ever has, and I am confident the longer I stay, the more eloquent it will evolve. There was a lot of my speaking French and the other side using English, which we both appreciated. There were days I only spoke French, in simple and truncated sentences, and by the time I left for Athens I sat for far too long trying to remember the English word for suitcase. Why I didn't look it up, I don't know, but I texted my best friend, who laughed at the scene. She lives in Turkey, and she's had her moment on occasion, too. Though, she was shocked I was so comfortable there, knowing how much time I spend in Athens every year.

My window view on a rain-kissed afternoon.

I spend the winter thinking about Greece, my returns, and my days of natural vitamin D on my balcony with the roars of Vespas and screeches of city life. This year, I have pomegranate trees on my overlook, and the symbolism they provide has not escaped me. My first year, I had kumquat trees, the second was nada, the third was basic shrubs, and now I have a blossoming boon of a few trees. Succulents thrive on the table. My legs stretch out next to my mastika liquor-laced lemonade. The sun sets earlier in southern Europe, but the days are equally blissful and poetic. My neighborhood sings my name most days, and the coffee kiosk has a moment of my soul with daily freddoccinos. The picturesque brilliance of comfort and familiarity settle me here.

Mastika mineral water with a lemonade riddled with mastika liquor and my Athenian view.

Athens called me home again. Even after the glitter of Paris, the turquoise waters of Nice, and the provencal days of Aix, the home of an Aegean heart remains true and wanders home for a season.

Dear Dianne

2024-02-10T13:36:00.004-05:00

In late December, I tried to write again to fall short to the binds of writer's block and life. Yet, now, a month and a half later, here I am.

***

It's been three weeks now since the surgery narrative changed. The message on my phone saying she passed is still clear as day in my mind's eye. Two days ago, I let my iTunes play a random list of songs. That was my bad, knowing good and well that that's rarely a good idea. Joanne came on, and it hit me as I climbed five floors, gasping for air--not from the steep ascension this time--as I struggled, shaking to put the key in my door. It's always something like that, a song out of the blue, to knock the wind and fragile peace right out of you.

That damned Lady Gaga song connected to us and me, and now it haunts me like a memory you can never fully pack away. I've lived longer with lupus and RA than I did without; that song was written about the loss of someone from lupus, yet in its release, it's more along the lines of losing a friend too soon. Dianne and I knew the story; we found it too sad to bear, and now here we are with her gone and those of us who knew her left behind.

That morning, I had a history date slip my mind, and while I googled it, normally, I would have sent her a text. Her being an hour behind always laughed and quipped back a non-googled response, even as she sat an hour behind my East Coast time. The natures of friendships, across years running into a decade plus, take natures of design often unpredicted or unplannable by the most calculating intellectual. I stood, holding my phone, crushing down a wave of emotional angst as I remembered--again, there was no Dianne on the other end of the phone.

We met nearly fourteen years before at a work event. Standing outside the Lousiville Convention Center, timid to talk to a stranger in our lingering adult years, cigarettes invited short banter all week. The following year, I saw her again, off by herself with tight blonde curls, a pink purse, smoking a cigarette, flipping through her Blackberry to look busy and pass the time of awkward adult acknowledgments. I cheered, "I know you from last year!" The nerves broke, and giggles erupted.

She met me while I was doing a bit on something or the other. Riffing on those steps, invoking laughter, was (well, is) my way to deflect anxiety via humor. Making friends as an adult is hard, so very hard. Years passed, we met up, we texted, we called. I had major surgery, lost a second sibling, had a marriage and divorce, moved to an apartment equated to "moving on up" in Manhattan, had my heart break in a manner it never had before, a hospitalization, the isolation and fear of COVID while in NYC and living alone, and the long list of life's fallacies and valleys. Her line of life evolved with the loss of her mother, her own fears of COVID-19, familial triumphs and trials (as we all typically do), the questions of life's reality versus the Instagramable qualities portrayed to us, and more. These were the messages of life via text and phone. In the end, our timeline evolved.

Texts are frozen on my phone, with memories seeping out at unexpected times. When she told me about cancer, we sat on the phone talking and making inappropriate jokes about how much weight she'd lose post-tumor and the lack of need for her uterus since she had her kids and a third seemed like a bad move of stocks on the market already set in motion. I sent her a Taylor Swift vinyl from a memory of us accidentally catching the outside of a show on her Red tour. The era is more mine, as Speak Now was hers, but we both long giggled about that night. We sat at a window bar facing the Yum Center, drinking KY Bourbon Ale and laughing. Later, we sat across the street, outside the YUM Center's doors, listening to songs below from inside. It was a beautiful, even though humid, early June Kentucky evening. The power of a moment and memory can take you far.

We never thought a tumor would be wrapped around an artery. We relied on the greater chance of survival and a lesser chance of death at the surgery. Fate had another answer.

Accidental encounters, moments of sipping Ale 8 while walking and sighing, and happy and complicated moments from the past year tend to pack themselves away while escaping their intentional compartments. We never know how these moments will affect us later, but it is often a shock when life serves them to you again. Now, as I process Dianne's loss, I remember our secrets and conversations. Her laughter at my stories from my years in KY, which, as she liked to remark, are a stark difference from my NYC life and her adoration for her family. Even when they tried her nerves and sense of self, she loved them. That was always undeniable. Her wit and charm, sometimes brutal, brought laughter. Her being my Google date finder, me being her sounding board, and Google finder for facts are bonds that can't be undone.

Just as a song can take you back, random moments can, too. These days, my phone still shows her as the second or third contact suggested for sharing. I wonder when that will fade, and she'll fade out. She won't fade from my memory, but technology will eventually erase her. That's the reconciling point that I have to reconcile. One day, it will all soften. One day, it won't feel so raw. Until then, it's smaller steps, long breaths while tweaking lectures, pauses as I reach for my phone to send her a funny moment from my morning lecture to quip about how the professor smashed into the podium while pontificating on Robber Barons and capitalism. Her laughter and snark that high school teachers are too tame for will live in my memory just as her comfort and charm shaped a part of me--and me her--as our lives stayed connected coastlines apart.

Dear Di. Goddamn, this is hard.

Disappearing.

2023-07-19T08:19:00.000-04:00

Sitting an ocean away, on another summer of work via escapism (or is that vice versa), I've finally slowed down to process the past year. The threats to unalive me from students, my resignation from there, my words being taken out of context (perhaps purposefully) in my day-to-day life and not even personally, to a three-word text, and being back together two weeks later, to being ghosted in the cold squalls of mid-February. My head still spins at it all, especially with how busy I've been this year. Though, as these things go, dreams and missed ones cross the mind's eye. I'm still numb and waking up from the emotional coma. It's not the emotional coma of 2020-1, but it hits different without a coherent definition or design.

While in France, I found a sense of peace one day. I was so at ease and comfortable while kayaking that when someone asked where I was from, I answered something else. Girls on the kayak away responded, with snickers, as I tried to take a moment to regroup my thoughts. I understood the question, yet I needed a minute to answer it in a tongue, not my native. This moment, snark and all, is a metaphor for much of my life.

I'm still trying to catch my breath and not remember when. While in Paris this past June, I stopped dead as I looked at love locks. A white Jeep rolled down the way (an American Jeep in Paris!), and all I could think of was why I had to see that here! It took me a minute to catch my breath on Pont des Arts. As if one queue, like a basic tragic movie soundtrack would, sad lyrics ran through my head. "I wouldn't want to marry me either," echoed its painful bridge chords through my mind. I could feel them in my spine and toes as I sighed. I wonder when the day will come that I stop running into memories of him around corners, in shops, and in the occasional bar I enter.

In Marseille, I kept myself busy and my mind at bay. Yet, with a poetic full moon one night, I woke up to it shining brightly through my window. I sat up and curled into my knees, somewhat shocked that I did, and I longed for him next to me. I hadn't let that thought cross my mind in months. Yet, there I sat with it echoing in the corners and forefront. No matter where you go, the memories are still there, always when you least expect them.

I still see our lives flash from time to time. Like last week while picking up groceries in Athens. Literally, as I turned an aisle corner, I looked up to fire logs at eye level. I stood there sighing, "When will I stop seeing him wherever I go?" as I pushed that memory down like we did those Moscow Mules our final night last summer. When things happen, good or bad, I still sometimes want to tell him first. I sigh.

Bourbon, my dog, finally started sleeping on his side of the bed again. In June, right before I left him at his summer home for the summer he surrendered to our new reality.* More than a year after he started smothering me and refusing to sleep on someone else's side of the bed, still looking for him and wagging his tail at his voice, all the while sometimes stealing his hoodie or tee for a pillow when I wasn't in them, my little rescue gave up the goat on the man he nestled into at night to remain snug between us, on him while seeing me. The things we can't unsee. My little 80-proof knows.

Almost a year and a half into the dance it ended with a ghost's echo of literal proportions, and my heart can't stomach the thought of bothering again. My track record reeks of the Renaissance Faire we went to last August: underwhelming, crowded with misguided signs, and overpriced merchandise crammed on shelves leaving much to be desired and us to wonder what the hoopla was all about. Apparently, we've been told we got a dud day, and I ponder what about me makes me the continual dud in finding life's design in relationships and myself. These are the questions I avoid asking, the ones that surface on a full moon's night and in the moments when the guard is down and grocery store aisles turn into metaphorical landmines of memory and heartache.

Travels back to Greece, and while here, I've been reading travel literature and fiction, crafting pitches, and preparing for an interview. While working to regain me, a friend saw me yesterday and sputtered, "Annessa, you look like you're disappearing." I'm thinner, you see, and the mix of language syntax is a perfect metaphor as I see it. As I walked home yesterday is the anticyclone heat of what we've named Charon and barely avoided melting, I thought about how we all disappear into ourselves, lives, loves, and losses. Sometimes it is healthy, often not. Part of me disappears knowing I'm not moving West, and the prolonged thoughts of marrying him, after he brought it up more than once, stand frozen in time. Neither is happening, and a part of me is lost to that memory. I've disappeared into the fight to compartmentalize and push forward. The depression of loss awoke me at night, made my days hazy and lonely, and left Bourbon as my champion of companion and sanity. Bourbon disappears into cuddling his person, rarely leaving her side and wondering why she's not the same anymore.

The disappearance of time and place are not the same. The disappearance of ourselves evolves and changes over time. As I spend another eternal summer under the Grecian sun, I profoundly wish I didn't have to leave and make plans to relaunch a life, my lost relationship and life disappear into the pages read and written, the stories I tell, and the dreams of reality and landscape of the present.

*Bourbon's summer home is my parent's house.

Loosing Heartstrings

2022-10-30T14:34:00.005-04:00

At twenty-one minutes to midnight, my phone said, "Annessa, We're over." I couldn't breathe, and I felt my heart stop. My heart hasn't beat the same in the days since. Like a country song, it hurts to breathe. A handful of messages later, after I begged, he called in the cruelty of it all.

Our lives have been playing like a video reel in my mind, and us laughing for no reason while we rolled through yellow lights touching his Jeep's ceiling, driving down from Denver as darkness covered and snow fell. We wondered how anyone in Colorado got out of their driveways alive; we joked they probably weren't from there anyway. Our dogs carry beef rolls in the yard like cigars. Him popping out his elbow for me to take his arm as we walked down streets, across parking lots, or nearly anywhere. Him picking me up at the airport nervous, him picking me up at the airport and wrapping his arms around me to say, "welcome home." Our seemingly endless days and nights in the backyard with the fire are little solaces. As we walked a decline while hiking, he reached his hand back to take mine and ensured I was safe. Safe.

He felt like home to me. There've been very few relationships, and of my three major ones, he was the only one to feel like home. I've long had insomnia, and it eases and breaks with him. Now, it's in overdrive. For months I've awoken in the night to reach for him when we aren't together. Bourbon won't sleep in his old spot on the bed anymore and hasn't since March. Now, Bourbon walks on me and curls into me, still leaving half the bed open for a man no longer there, and I wake up to remember it is over through designs, not my own. I lay awake again. I wonder when the pain will stop.

I wondered what the power of loving again meant as I prepared to change life's direction willingly and whole-heartedly. I'm in the middle of a five-year plan, and I've long said I was going back West or to Europe. I thought the plan solidified with West my direction to the man I love with the ease of breathing and refreshment of a deep slumber. He'd awoken me from years of frozen, stationary, and dysfunctional relationships. During the shutdown, he tried reaching out, and I kept him at bay. A year later and my frozen walls were melting. Now I wonder what is the point of loving again when I'm still the lone man left at the plate. No one tells you what to do when the rug is pulled out from beneath you and you're blindsided with such force that the air leaves the room. When he changes his mind, without warning, there is no guidebook.

Dancing in his kitchen while cooking one night, sitting with my head on his shoulder and his resting on mine while reading from our phones, conversing on things that were irking us, learning to communicate with a partner when we'd both been alone for so long, trusting said partner, and making plans for home products, a camper, and a weekend excursion do not escape me now. He kept the world at bay for me, as comliexities of work and life had ebbeded away at me, and I thought we were good at leaning in on each other like partners do. We had our faults, as all do. Yet, I thought we far outweighed the negative; good had won, or so I falsely thought. Falling asleep with my head on his lap while we watched television seem like a romantic fever dream. I'm left gasping for air.

I didn't mention him ignoring my birthday since mine are usually best spent isolated anyway. I knew my birthday would always be on me, and I'd make my plans alone. He wouldn't come to NY, as work played a hand. I understood. Miscommunications as we learned each other's quirks, but raging fights of movie scenes never happened. We had a couple of busy weeks, with my plan of us settling into our chats and calls this week dying unexpectedly. I'd said as much, that we just had a busy two weeks ahead. As lovers do, even in the same house, days can pass where they will not. Then, the forces of tides calm and life settles back into the rythmns of comfort and connection. In that parting call, he said he didn't want to worry about me because of the added stress from work. I couldn't speak. No one tells you what to do when loving him becomes his burden.

I'm told I love too fiercely.

So many decisions I had been making with him in mind, as we'd been consulting each other on most things for months. Or at least I thought. I thought he meant his promise to have a conversation if either of us needed to slow down, take a break, or reevaluate us. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, we ended up on a trajectory to get married. I had thought we were planning to live our lives together, and when he had brought up marriage--two seasons back--it was in the abstract sense. I never thought it was something we were thinking about for the here and now, this year--calendar or figurative--and when he said he didn't want that with me I couldn't breathe. I never wanted to be the girl sitting here wondering how it all ended. I didn't think it would. I'm not one to bring up marriage.

I just don't know how to not be his girl anymore. A year and change later, I don't know where I'm supposed to be.

Dreams undone. An unrequested dream. Things left undone. Pictures sit on a shelf, as my heart remains locked two hours behind.

Pervasive Days.

2022-10-23T22:22:00.001-04:00

I've been back from my summer away for nearly two months. I finally put all my jewelry away that had been sitting in a lock box. I'd fish out a piece every now and then, but mostly I'd been wearing the hull I'd pulled out for the summer. That's how these things usually go. Yet, as I pulled the pieces from the box, I wasn't prepared for the memories woven into silver and stone. The black beaded chocker I wore to a friend's Vegas wedding, for which I was the Maid of Honor. She and I don't speak anymore, yet I can't pass on the necklace I've long not worn. It hangs on a back hook in the jewelry case, so I rarely see it. Memories of our twenty-year friendship linger, pervasive, and are here to stay like a roach infestation that baffles the best Orkin man, yet I won't reach out. Read a few posts back, as my heart doesn't have it left in me.

I don't have jewelry from my sister. There's a ring I bought for my Dad to give her. It's on his desk, and he's not ready to let it go. When he is, I'll take it. I may not wear crosses, but that one I would. These days I've needed her more than I'd like to admit. Even in the anger of what she left me with, and even in the bitterness of life when she would do what she would do, I still remember the fleeting days when she would show up for me. Right now, my heart aches for siblings long gone, and the wreck of my life long for one of them on my phone.

She did wear a ring I bought her for her 40th birthday until she died. It was a wide ring with "faith" scripted on it. I saw it in a photo she posted not long before the cancer effects took her. That intangible memory gives me solace. I hope her mother is haunted by it. Yes, I said what I said.

I hear there's fingerprint jewelry I can get made. That I believe I need more than not. My Dad should have the fingerprints, but he can't bring himself to look in the box of our records. Much like that ring on his desk, there are layers of grief that never fade away. I've still got a card from Andy Jr and one from Vinnita, and at some point, I'll have those fingerprints and engrave them with their handwriting. I won't get ink of them on my body as I find that perverse. While I have cherry blossoms wrapped in an anchor with a butterfly, with those pink buds about my brother, I personally find the labeling of names and dates on my body as too much. People die, and we can't keep them alive. We can grieve, mourn, and miss them, but we can not bring them back. Tonight is a night I might pull my brother's fleece out. That's where my heart is. I slept with his shirt for a year after he passed, and it took me fifteen years to say his name again. A year and a half after his death, I went to his place of internment. I still haven't been to Vinnita's. It's been a year and three months. So, I guess I'm on track as I was with Andy Jr.

As I put laundry away today and placed accessories into their holding spots, I heard myself say, "I need to see my sister." That I do. I think in January I'll find the time and spend a week. I've been saying I'd go to the Grand Canyon for a while, and I have to do so. So, as with so many things in my life, I'll be doing this alone. I'm the only one here to show up for myself. Tanfer's too far away, and there's no one else. That's a heartbreaking and terrible testament to my own life, but the truth is what it is. Perhaps my Dad would be ready to go, as I'd stay with my Mom for a few days. Perhaps. Sometimes I shock myself; today was one of those moments at I hung black tees ready for wear in the days ahead.

As I flashed to lunches with Tanfer as necklaces and rings found their homes, I remembered long summer days in Colorado and walks through Boulder as I smiled as I fingered beaded hoops. A part of me will always love Colorado, even with the heartbreak the state has given me. Thinking about it now makes my heart bleed in ways I didn't know I had left in me. When you think you're done grieving and losing, there's still more hidden around corners and in cracks, you thought were minimal and benign.

An Istanbul view, 2022. Galata Tower Neighborhood.

Ridiculously hot walks this past summer in Istanbul seep from an elephant ring I wear, and days of chaos and dreams envelop a ring from the old Afghan market at Sultanahmet. The latter was purchased fourteen years ago. These days I long for the apartment from last summer, with the view and breeze. The camiler calls to prayer, jolting me from a deep slumber at five am, lingering like a lover's kiss in my mind's eye. I miss the boats of the Bosphorus and the calls to prayer in similar ways. I miss the sirens of New York City, and the endless voices as Athenians wander home at hours long past sunset. The things we miss are often intangible and fleeting. Yet, they capture our memory and mind in ways we could never predict. My endless days in Greece remind me of perfect escapes. I need these right now.

Monastiraki Square, Athens. 2022.

I sent Tanfer a pic of a turquoise necklace I was given ions ago. Aunt Sharon, i.e., a family friend, gave it to me. It's pewter and mini squash blossom style. I wondered if she knew that five-year-old dolled up, with her curls bouncing like slinkies, would still have those pieces 40+ years later. Sometimes she still crosses my mind. Every now and again, I wear one of the turquoise pieces I have from her. Every now and again, life brings a season for it.

I smelled someone smoking a Marlboro Red this week. I stopped in my tracks, breathing in the stench, and remembered my sister. If I could only capture Marlboro Red smoke into a locket for release on the days of life when the lonely seasons become so heartbreaking that the broken can't stand to breathe it in anymore.

Over the past month, I've had two accounts of threats to my personal safety. It took acts of hell to finally get a pepper spray canister for my key ring. I had to show up for myself on that one. That's not the kind of jewelry you store away in your trinket box, but it is the type of accessory both of my dysfunctional siblings would have expressed mailed to me. And that is what I am left with these days.

My life's struggles, insults, and inhumanity are smashing me these days. Just wasting my soul as I struggle to recover from a writer's block so fierce I literally sit frozen at my computer, fretting that I won't have my presentation for Tuesday done, that every decision in my life is bound for another colossal failure, that loving again will be another act of self-destruction as I'm not valuable enough to hang around for, and that I'll still be stuck in a stationary moment without growth while those around me continue to move on and evolve in ways my life's station prevents. Seven years ago I wondered if I would ever love again. These days I wonder what the power of loving again is worth. Is it me? Is it just life, as we call it?

Perhaps the writer's block is cracked.

Motorcycle Memories

2021-11-26T01:30:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago, Tuesday, to be precise, as I walked down 186th with my dog, flashes of an old memory hit me so hard I nearly fell over. In the five or so minutes it took to get to Broadway, I found myself reliving a long-packed away memory of my sister and her long-gone motorcycle. It was a Honda, as I know someone will ask. Beyond that, my friends, it was silver, and I don't know anything of the makes, models, and snazz of bikes. Yet, I went to see my sister in the summer of 2000 when she first showed me her bikes. Well, they belonged to her and her then-girlfriend.

As sisters will do, the older one convinces the younger to go for a quick ride. Honestly, that wasn't hard. What she didn't realize, and was floored to learn, it was not my first time as a passenger. Though, for me, it was a complete shock that she rode bikes. Look, you all, my sister loved her truck, but she was never the type to devote an intense amount of energy to the road. She loved her speed, but she wasn't about to check mirrors. Okay, okay . . . in hindsight, I do see the fault of my logic. So, she lived on Mercury Boulevard in VA Beach back then, and she and I went for subs that day.

A ride of about two miles in either direction, give or take a few.

As we got on the bike, Sheila took a picture, and I had on jeans with wide, frayed cuffs and ribbon trim. A classic hippie style I'm still known to don. I wore a white peasant top with red, yellow, and blue embroidery. I still love the memory of that shirt. She had on a red polo and jeans, as was her go-to. At one time, I think she owned every style of red polo made. We giggled. She said, "make sure you hold on tight there, little girl." Me being me, said, "alright bitch." Hey, everyone knows don't fucking call me a little girl: in the early aughts or now.

Helmets on. We went down the road, around the neighborhood, over a couple of through-traffic streets, and finally up to a sub place. We got two; she got a meatball with absolutely no vegetables except an unholy amount of banana peppers, and mine was turkey with the standard vegetables. Clear as day, I can still smell the mayonnaise on that fresh-baked, gooey bread. Wrapped in foil, she tucked them into the carrier, and then down the fucking road we went. She sped, she leaned, she cackled. SHE CACKLED. Dude. Again, being related to her at all, I shouldn't have been surprised. We made it back to her house, and we sat in the carport eating them with beers. That night there would be people over for a barbeque in the backyard.

Sheila proposed to Vinnita that night, and it was done so I would be there. Sheila made a deal to tell me that later in the weekend. I had appletini liquor that night, the better part of a bottle, and Vinnita was drinking vodka in her Mountain Dew. That was one of the last times I drank cocktails not involving Bourbon, fun fact. Not-so-fun-fact, vodka was her go-to drink (to hide it) for most of her adult life. Another hindsight reminds me of how often she was loaded while driving.

The next day Sheila draped her frame on one bike, and Vinnita and I got on another. By the way, did I tell you we were riding a bike with me in fucking Birkenstocks? My toes were painted maroon, a fact I distinctly remember from the second ride. I did so well on day one they decided to have a real ride. That sister of mine took me on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel on that Honda.

As we revved up to get to the tunnel, her cackles grew louder. Seriously, for a woman newly engaged and as pickled as we were, she sure had energy. If you have ever been in that tunnel, you will know the next part is fucking amazeballs insane. Zipping between cars, she got that damned thing to 85 as we zoomed through a packed tunnel. At some point, I closed my eyes in self-defense before starring at my toes, thinking the color would match the impending blood to come, and when the "ride" subsided back in her driveway, I cried a little. I was 24 that summer, and there are some things that I worked hard to keep corralled away in dusty boxes of memory. Neatly tucked away like packages of fruitcakes under the Christmas tree.

Vinnita found herself very funny. She was never so proud of herself as she was that day. Though, that night there was a full-blown party for that engagement. Her friends pondered how they could convince me to play for the home team, with a slew of lines about "I won't put you on a motorcycle, and I've got a corvette/mustang/etc."

The weekend ended, and I drove two hours inland to my parents' house. I was likely still far past the legal intoxicated amount, as my blood was nothing more than appletini liquor and kool-aide vodka shots. Our brother came down a weekend or so later. He was eager to know about my stay at Vinnita's, as family dynamics were always a complicated web of things better left unsaid. When I told him and Jimmy (his boyfriend) about the motorcycle, Andy Jr. decided to avoid a trip with Vinnita. Though, he was straight up flabbergasted that she had one. Jimmy, though, flat out quipped it's a right of passage when you get out of the military to get a fast car or a motorcycle. I would have bet a more significant amount of money on a DUI, but that is a debate for another day.

The following summer, I was there again, as that wedding she had spoken of was intended for the fall at that point. The world doesn't know that she and Sheila had a commitment ceremony in the backyard the weekend I was there. There was a blowout party; we slept on the floor in piles looking like a post-Vietnam convention of vets and spouses (as 90+ percent of Vinnita and Sheila's friends were retired military, in various degrees of service). I had those same jeans on a year later. I was in a tank top as I stood by the arch in the back yard as Vinnita and Shiela promised lives and happiness in a ceremony not yet recognized by the state. There are photos sprinkled in my sister's things. Of me, looking befuddled, shocked, and moderately drunk, as I wasn't told of the ceremony beforehand among the ones of jubliation. She kept that not-so-secret ceremony from our Dad until she passed.

Oddly, I should note that Sheila kept her distance from me as on another visit, my sister had a bruise she blew off, and I looked at Sheila and did what sisters do. I don't fully recall the details of what I said (again, there were undoubtedly fermented beverages involved), but apparently, I did more than intimidate her. Vinnita, and some of her friends, straight up told me Sheila was afraid of me and told them all not to cross me. I will say I started the conversation by stating, "I don't know you, or like you, enough to miss you." So, if anything, that was a win. When our brother came a few months later, he told her that I was right, except he was a lot of the side of foul when he told her off. I'll leave that for your imagination. In the course of that, Vinnita got butthurt Andy wouldn't go for a ride with her. Why?

Well . . .that brother of mine made it clear that "after what Nessa said, and with what we used to do to her if you frightened her, then I'll pass." Ha. That's all. Ha.

In the course of things, I would see Vinnita that March, and by May of 2002, she would be gone (again). She did one of her disappearing acts, leaving me to have to resort to calling her exs and digging deep when our brother passed a year later in 2003. She had a penchant for disappearing every five or so years, always knowing I'd be the one left in the wake to sleuth for her address for Christmas and holiday cards. She surfaced again in 2009, and it was a cycle. Again. Yet, in 2020 when she moved from North Carolina to Arizona, the signs were not in favor of it being life as usual. That summer, she did pass, and in the course, the pain of searching for a woman who wanted me to find her but didn't want me at the same time is eased.

I do wish I had that photo; it's probably faded with creased corners by now. I wonder what her mother did with the boxes of photos, gifts from me, trinkets, and letters between us and the more extensive web of Vinnita's past. I wonder if she found the kinky shit. Ya know, much like the trend going around on Tik Tok about disposing of the pervy, kinky, and insane evidence from a sibling when they die, Vinnita and I had such a pact. We weren't close, mainly as her stance about me and her mental state played heavily into our makings. After Andy Jr. died, she was never the same, for sure. Yet, I guess I can say one gets what she deserves as her mother owns the box of kinks (as I call them). You're welcome on the image.

In a long meandering way, this post is really about how the second set of holidays plays with you. The first ones riddle you with shock, and the second makes it all an apparent, enduring reality. When my brother died, I didn't know what to do with myself that first Christmas, so I painted 900 million ornaments in various stages of intricacy. Last year, for Vinnita, I was spending half my time in NYC and half in NC. I was barely alive, as my heart was frozen in time, and the antidepressants were barely giving me metaphorical air. I think my project was staying afloat. This year I have a sweater I started in Greece from yarn a friend gifted me. Maybe I'll finish that. I have a purple pickle dish quilt I might do. Perhaps my body will cooperate and let me run again, but--then again--an angry, firey spine has opinions on that subject. Maybe I'll write. The point: grief is a dirty mistress of unknown strength, secret whims, and unpredictable desires. She pushes at you. It makes life hard. It makes life stand still in time for no reason at all and every excuse under the sun.

It's not all bad. The memory of those rides, while terrifying as fuck, is pretty damned funny two decades later. That being noted, I'll be back to my regularly scheduled questionable life decisions and bizarre things men say to me.

Her and me, Christmas 2010.

Bikinis and Memories

2021-08-11T17:43:00.000-04:00

While in Greece, I have clambered down a gorge, floated in Poseidon's waters, probably tempted the wrath of Zeus (this is me after all), wandered aimlessly, made a friend or two (I think), and nearly forgotten what the word trouble means. Then again, I did say nearly . . . yet, along the way, the biggest thing that has awakened me is the shelling out of a disproportionate amount of my budget on new clothes. As in, I went to a few big box stores and bought summer attire. I shelled out some dough at local, Greek shops too. I mean, I have certainly given more than my fair share to the Greek economy this summer. I'm here for a few more weeks, and I'm certain local coffee shops (like the one near my flat), some restaurants, and maybe another bar or two will see my cash. Tis the nature of life. Yet . . .

I won't say I'm a skinny mini. Hell, I've never been that. In high school, my junior year, there's a pic of my Dad and me at the JROTC installation ceremony. I was in multi-inch heels, I was 5-foot-1, and I stood at 150 pounds. People, my lupus was also raging like a damned sea beast at the time. Seriously, like a fucking sea monster only Homer count have imagined! With that, I tell you that in graduate school, I hit 150. Yeah. I also bottomed out not long after, ended up in the hospital. Good times. The lupus was a bitch in toxic heels too. Just sayin'. On that note, let's look at it now.

I'm off a few nasty big pharma drugs--long-term steroids is one--and the weight tends to magically drop with that. I've still got my big pharma sidecar too. The RA is awake a bit too. Oh well. My body still gets pissy if I eat much, so I'm over here on two cups of coffee (sometimes three) a day, fruit mid-day, and dinner. Not gonna lie that I've taken to some Greek chocolate or ice cream in the evenings. Can't do that ice cream too much since the whole dairy doesn't like my thing is still alive and well. I'm walking 10k steps a day, or more, like I usually do. I'm a city girl at heart, and even on islands floating in the Aegean, I eschew the rental car and hoof it. Of course, there's also the factor that driving in these parts is like playing frogger with your life. Yeah. I'll pass. Just my daily existence is like a game of frogger. I don't need added feats to overcome (or frighten the bejesus of me and those I know).

So, back to those chain stores. While in H&M, I bought one black skinny dress and a bikini. There were a few other things in there, but those two are the marks of triumph. I mean, my gym shorts . . . y'all don't give a rats rear end that I picked up a pair of those. But that bikini is a real one. It's not a tankini, one with a super high cut set of bottoms, or one with a skirt (I had one of those at the end of the '90s, I believe). That being said, I haven't worn a real bikini since I was small. To-this-day, I remember the day I stopped. I was about six when you could still flutter about in a bathing suit midday--in the grocery, the photoshop, the car repair place, the liquor store--and no one paid a mind. It was the early 1980s by this point. I still remember the words that made me curl my arms around my stomach and feel my insides curdle. None of us really need to go into that one. I'll let you use your imagination. Yet, those words--by grown-ass men--stuck with me. Then, in middle school, I had a friend who also told me how I needed a diet and to lose weight. Yeah, she was kind of a bitch. I wasn't overweight; at the private school I was at, kids were rude as fuck, by they at least didn't have me in the fat category. I wore clothes from the so-called normal-sized racks back then, as I do now, and she thought my size eight to nine frame was huge.* She also modeled for a while, and last I heard from her, she was still obsessed with looks and image. Bite me in the best Gen Xer voice I can muster.

So, I bought a damned bikini at H&M. At this point, I'm not sure if I finally--a few weeks later--had the courage to wear it because I'm tired of wearing my black one from Indiana (that's a full-coverage bikini), since my Abba one (I made right before leaving NYC) is too large, or if it's one of my "she's coming undone" moments. Anyone who knows me knows when stress and fear explode, I get a little scrappy and--well--wild(ish).

Yeah, my Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer days before the first anniversary of my sister's death from cancer. Technically, Vinnita had a heart attack, but it derived from a myriad of things. The chemo, her smoking, her drinking, her mental state . . . as for my Mom, this is her third damn bought. When I was five, she lost her uterus to cancer, and I remember many things from that. I remember her Mom coming, and Grandma Jackie gave me a pink lollypop at one point. I overheard the adults talking, and a family friend I called Aunt Sharon was the one who told me. We sat on the couch, hers as I remember, as Aunt Sharon being Aunt Sharon, didn't hold back. Just as she wore her hair big and donned heels, she poured a drink and leaned in and back. It was not a cocktail. It was a drink. Scotch. On the rocks. She took a sip and handed it to me, and told me to take one like she did. I wasn't stupid, nor had I not been around alcohol at this point. I took a small one. Drinking adult drinks meant something was up. Perhaps I, to-this-day, look back on that period, seeing Mom in the hospital, and after when she came home as just another moment because Aunt Sharon told me that Mom was lucky and the cancer was found early and it was an easier kind to handle. Maybe. Or maybe it was the scotch. I hear she's gone now. I sure could use a scotch with her now. Years later, Mom had a relatively minor bought with skin cancer. After a while, you become numb.

Back to those lollies. Grandma gave me one to give Mom. To-this-day, when Mom is in the hospital, she gets one. Not sure my parents knew that derives from her Mom giving me that pink lolly. It was the big ball-shaped ones. I'm 45 now, and I still won't touch a pink lolly. As a kid, people thought it was strange. I had my reasons. Clearly, we find out more on the 18th, and I'll see her around Labor Day. The universe has refined the gut-punch these days.

So, yeah. Maybe I'm just "coming undone," maybe 45 really does look fucking good on me, maybe Greece is good for me, or maybe none of it matters. After a year of tone-deaf fucking MDs with statements of you need to "aggressively lose weight" (what the fuck does that actually mean), insisting that I need a gastric bypass, and reminding me in no uncertain terms that I'm obese if I feel comfortable in a real bikini so be it. I've got half my MDs saying, "What? That's crazy!" One got a little hot; that was fun to watch. I enjoyed that one! Though I'll have you know, I'm still considered obese. Yup. Even more so, if I feel so comfortable that I climb my frame from the sand and towel to walk up to the beach bar in said bikini and no cover-up for a drink, then so be it. I stayed for a couple of hours, and the joy of it was watching grown men fall over themselves to get me a seat and the bartender beg to take my order. A couple screwdrivers and a plate of fries later, under the Grecian sun, life was even better than it had been at dawn's light out on Naxos deep in the Cyclades. I hadn't been to a bar since before the pandemic. Damn.

Years ago, not long after I met him, a friend told me Naxos is one of his favorite places. Then again, he's Greek and is probably eating his own soul at not being here this summer. But, yeah, I totally get the love affair. I highly recommend Absolute and fresh orange juice (seriously, you'd be hard-pressed to find a joint serve you bottled). That and the sand . . . as it is me, a drunken lunatic decided to tell me about climate change and the Gods. My Greek isn't that great, but people, I caught enough. I will have you know; there are a few decent men left. The married Irish CEO next to me chatted sporadically to quell the crazy Greek two stools over. He was here with his wife and 22-year old daughter. I told him to tell his daughter that he was the MVP by saving me and that her next boyfriend should have that quality. Legit.

On that note, I have to pack before my ferry back to Athens, where my terrace calls for falling asleep on the seating while I write.

*I apologize for that term. The lack of a better one is the best I can say right now. Normal is relative, as we all know. Normal for me is on the edge of mainstream sizes and being just under plus size. That's life in modern America. Pfft.

Languages and Messages

2021-07-31T07:08:00.000-04:00

The view from my terrace. Do I ever have to say goodbye?

It's funny how a language comes back in an instant. At the end of June, I hopped on a Turkish Airlines flight for Greece, and in that course of life, I found my barely used Turkish coming back as I heard the stewardess talking to each other and passengers. On that flight, from NYC to Instanbul, I was in the middle seat between two dudes taller than me. They were both the most polite and kind passengers I've encountered in . . . well, forever. One insisted on helping me schlep my tote bag to the overhead compartment (my bag of medications, yes . . . and that's embarrassing to have that many prescription drugs for two months). The other made sure I was left a flight bag and water when I dozed off. In essence, it was a good combination. I read, slept, and watched some blah movies. We all did.

As the flight carried on for nine hours, I responded to the stewardess in Turkish after the first encounter (in English) was an abrasive front. As these things go, she took an involuntarily step back, and her eyes grew wide. Our encounters were remarkably more mellow after that. Yet, as I drank my visne, I chuckled to myself on the simplicity of basic words and the barriers of language. Of course, after having not used my Turkish in nearly two years, my mind awakened from a slumber--as we say--and I realized the feel of an old friend enveloping you in an unexpected encounter.

Graffiti in the city holding the world's record for it. I find this one fitting, as I see it nearly daily on my walk from Omnia Station to class.

Life in Athens has been pleasant to the point of forgetting where I'm from and when asked when I leave, I cringe inside. I'm here until the end of August, and I'd stay longer if the opportunity arises. My freelance gigs are still pretty dry from the COVID-19 belt-tightening, but there's hope, as we say. Though I arrived on a Wednesday and Thursday I walked from my place in Petralona across Fillipou Hill to Socrates's prison to the Parthenon and Acropolis and through Plaka and then Montraski. The old and new Agora's met me as I realized I did far more than I had planned. As I did that, my terrible Greek came to use . . . mostly ill played. Yet, my jeg-lagged body was more at peace than it had been in years. At night I looked up language classes in Athens, and I found the gem I'm at. I found myself at level A2 a couple of weeks later, which still shocks me. I'd like to be at a B1 level before I end. Yet, as my Greek manifests itself, it's comforting and shocking to understand a transition when people ask me things (sometimes I'm quick enough) and to read words as I go. A month in, I find myself reading the Greek words instead of the English on signs and markers. In the grocery store, I don't have to translate words most days. After a week of looking (they aren't in the cold section), I found the eggs--and I know the cherry cider I love and the Grecian brand of GF bread that is remarkably good. There's a Greek brand of chocolate that serves the soul, and cacao almond milk with my coffee is not the same as American almond creamer. Yet, it's so much better.

I've learned to start thinking in Greek as much as I can, and as such, the heat dome of Zeus is baking and boiling us. As we say, εχει πολυ ζεστη. Literally, that means it has a lot of heat. Really, it means: it's scorching. But, as you say it, it takes on the "it's so fucking hot we are all going to die. Ya-ya, stay inside. Look, the cockroaches are coming out of the sewers looking for shelter!" That's what 40+ degree days will give you (for the American group, that's 100-105 F we've been having).

These are the realities along the way. Though, two weeks ago, I was in Rhodes for a few days. While there, my hotel had a cleaning lady who barely spoke Greek, her English didn't go far, but her first language is French. Upon that, I found myself sliding into my old French--that's comical as I learned it in high school in Kentucky and then took a year or so in college--and the irony of speaking French while in Greece did not escape me.

As the days feel slow and perfect, nine am is a struggle for no real reason at all, and I settle into rhythms and balances of life; I long for the simplicity and pure sense of peace I've found here. Granted, there have been hard days, terrible things, and creepy-ass men (there's a story for another day). Yet, for now, I'm taking my Greek notes and a bilingual reader on Cleopatra to the beach. It's too hot for much else. I'll let the taxi take me there and home, as the bus is too crowded and the lack of proper mask-wearing alarms me. Yet, ironically, on the actual metro, mask-wearing is remarkably correct and good.

You can find me in my hat, on a beach bed, with a notebook riddled with Greek language markers and a cider.

τα λεμε.

Naked Yoga, the reprint

2021-06-23T17:13:00.003-04:00

Two years roundabout, I published a little piece on naked yoga, life, dating, and the dances we all do. The zine is now gone, as these things happen, but I have the rights back. As June tries to swallow me whole, with good things and a swarm of busyness I can't fully comprehend, I thought it would be fitting to re-publish this here.

I'm days away from two months in Greece, with writings, books and plans, and a million other things on the fire. Will I end up naked in Greece? In the shower, certainly. Elsewhere? Who knows. This is me, after all, the perpetual Lifetime Movie in the making.

This piece has remained one of my favorites--aside from a novel I'm hunting for an agent on--and as it's crossed my mind, again and again, I still ponder the simplicity of it all. It was a perfect evening, one that was meant to last for a moment--as so many relationships and vignettes of life do--but it served a purpose outside of its intent. It reminds of freedoms and intentions, hidden desires, unspoken quips deep within the lines, and--mostly--it reminds me that just when you least expect it, there's something new, a new challenge, and a new moment to refuel a lost and weary soul. These are things to remind ourselves of these days, or at least for me. I'm gingerly saying the clouds are passing, as it's been a veritable ride of hell these days. But, hope arises and glows in the morning sun, noon-hour light, and twilight dusk.

Naked Yoga.

On the scale of things to do, I would say Naked Yoga is one I never fully considered. Okay, let's be honest. I did not think about it. I snarked it. A handsome dude I'd been messaging asked if I’d meet him for Naked Yoga on a mid-week night. Without batting an eye, I said yes. And then sat there looking at the text with alarm that I needed to find a decent bra and panty set to wear since he'd see it and all my wobbly parts. A night's sleep, shower, and shave later, I found myself in Chelsea standing in front of the studio with my tote and yoga mat. One deep breath later—okay, more like five—I put one foot in front of the other and walked in with my head held high and my shoulders back. On the scale of options for a first date, this event certainly trumped brunch.

Yeah, I like brunch as much as the next white girl, but there are only so many times you can throw back a couple of mimosas with your eggs Florentine and not revolt from repetition and banality. I know, people are side-eyeing me on the whole "I detest brunch" thing, but—like all good things—it's been overdone and done again. Day drinking is cool and all, but let's be honest about that. I don't need a special header on my menu today drink; though, the cool factor of that you might be hungover and hitting the hair of the dog on a date factor does dissipate if you opt for Naked Yoga. That being said, that Naked Yoga . . .

In a studio lit with white holiday lights and windows looking into the city’s darkness filled with the glitter from street lights and apartment windows, a room full of men and three women (one being the instructor), I shimmied down to my birthday suit and set up my mat next to that dude I know. Sitting there, trying to find the beginning of zen I've never encountered in yoga, I thought, "This is certainly a first." Rules for the session were covered—ya know, no oogling and such—and then before I could blink we were off doing planks and downward dogs. There are things you cannot unsee, as the wave of men on the other side of the room did not wield a razor in their nether regions as bushes and hedges grew without restraint. Then there was the full-on bush on a woman. Afterward, my date and I chatted about many things—and aspects of the yoga class—and he wondered if she had to shampoo it. Without a second thought, I commented that shampoo and conditioner were needed as I went for the afro once upon a time. His eyes grew wide, as he already saw there is no afro now, and between laughs, we prattled on about another topic to catch steely glares from nearby subway riders. I will say, the instructor's downlow afro was shiny and well maintained. Her afro was pretty, if my hetero self can say that.

Looking back on the hour or so class, as I rose my frame and arms into tree pose, I did feel the fire in my spine quell some. I never did get the centering and zen I'm told that yoga brings; as I've said, I've never achieved that. Though, I feared—like others I’ve talked to—that downward dog would bring the chorus of flatulence. It did not, so there’s a bonus. While holding poses and raising my arms, I felt a healthy sense of calm and memories as past brazen events flashed through my mind. Similar to when I run half marathons, mile ten brings on the onslaught of every bizarre decision I've ever made; about halfway through the yoga session, I found myself in warrior pose, remembering the Turkish bath in Istanbul a decade ago. A friend from grad school and I took an afternoon and laid on the marble and let women wash our hair and our bodies. I was a few months past fibroid surgery, and my scar was still starkly visible. All the women were filled with questions concerning if I had lost a baby, and in my broken Turkish, I conveyed that I was fine and there never was a baby. A longer than usual scrub down conveyed stories of their pregnancies and babies.

As I moved from warrior to eagle, or maybe that was vice versa, I was shocked that I was so calm. Nerves that I expected weren't there. Then again, I'm the queen of compartmentalizing (as friends will tell you), and I’m no stranger to the naked dance. In Turkey, again, I showered with women I didn’t know after bathing in the waters and mud of Cleopatra. In that article I published a few years back, I didn't say that while in the warm mineral pools, several of us shimmed out of our suits for a spell. I was one. Why? Life is a continually changing sunrise and sunset, and that each day is a new dance and new story to craft. Perhaps I’m crazy. Perhaps I’m brazen. Perhaps I’m still crafting stories for my friends and their children to tell at holiday parties. “Remember my friend Annessa? Well, did I tell you what she did this time?”

As dates and yoga classes, go this one was undoubtedly one of the best. From the coffee beforehand, the fluid poses under dimly lit and perhaps romantic lights, to the endless chatter afterward. I look back, and it all rushes by in an intense moment of ease, comfort, and near blur. Would I do Naked Yoga again? The odds are pretty high. I found a sense of calm, still lacking the elusive zen I’m told will happen, and while I’d rather shimmy on a pole in dance class or run six angry miles, the experience was worth a second look, glance, and even stare. After all, I am the same girl who once danced naked in a National Park and streaked with such ease in college it was just another day when it happened. In the end, though, with as beautiful as that date was just because the surface was a Monet masterpiece and the dance was fluid, you won't find me using him as my subway pole to keep me steady on the jostling train cars around this city. Beautiful moments are sometimes just meant to be that, and perhaps we will cross paths again. Perhaps not. In the end, the knowledge of crafting another memory, day, and sunrise, and sunset that doesn't duplicate the other resides within the folds of my mind's eye. A best life lived. A best life won.

States of Reality

2021-06-11T17:43:00.005-04:00

These days folks are reflecting on the changes we've embraced from the pandemic. The losses of life and reality and the things we don't need in our lives are abounding. Aside from the obvious things of more time and less stress, friendships are certainly at the center of this discourse. I, like so many others, am no different. What shatters me is how things woke--for lack of something better--and how the endless exhaustion caused within and after has left me. As I wake in a reawakening world, and I set my feet back into patterns of semi-regularly, I'm left with new losses that can't be memorialized or precisely quantified.

I didn't hide the fact that ten months ago my sister passed, that eleven months ago a good friend died, or that family and friends died from age, life, or COVID-19. I thought someone was dead, and I learned that he was merely playing dead for me and living his life happy along the way. He doesn't understand why I'm angry, and he certainly doesn't understand why he's dead to me now. Yet, I still lost nine people--actually dead--with a metaphorical tenth one gone--last year. Yet, as a year turned to 15 months, and life rolled on, a friendship died when I finally stood my ground.

Without going into all the details of 20+ years, the truth of the matter is that in grad school, I was ditched when one of us got a funding line and the other didn't. Then, a few months later, she came to me to say she was sorry for ignoring me and shutting me out. There was talk about priorities or such. I forgave, as I do. A few years later, after a wedding and life evolved, my brother passed. Radio silence came again; I got one. "I'm sorry, but I can't help you." There was a scurry so quick to get off the phone, all these years later I can still feel the gust of air. I wasn't asking for anything. Though I will say when your brother dies by his own hand, and you lose those closest to you, it is heart-shattering. Months later, I got a call. Something happened; she needed me. I forgave her. I will say, though, that I didn't exactly forget. After all, something like that stays with the soul.

Things evolve, but as life goes, we tend to forgive more than we don't. We tend to hold onto memories and people long after they've proven they aren't as fulfilling as they once were. In many ways, it's like ordering the same thing from the Chinese menu as it's our so-called favorite. We still do it, eat it, and writhe from the bloat and half-satiated feeling of being greased out. Yet, we aren't full from a well-balanced meal, rich with flavor. Instead, we are full of grease and cheap seasonings, GMO food, and fried goods that give a momentary flurry of splendor, but they always leave us wondering why we did it after the fact. Relationships are like that. Ones that leave you on edge spend hours a week with vents and one-sided dialogues, being asked about you and having the narrative turned against you or changed within minutes to spend the next hour on someone else, to see therapists dropped when they want someone to work on the problems and ask "if you aren't going to do the work why are you here," therapists I've seen, off and on, have asked me about the relationship and why it continued. I had no answer.

Last spring, when I found out my sister really was dying for real this time, and in the middle of the turbulence of life and our relationship, I was gobsmacked with the "you need to let the sister thing go, Nothing will come of it." My sister and I had our complexities, but losing her--the way it all happened--was awful. In all these months, I haven't been able to shake that comment. Things have arisen since, and I'm finally done. I deserve more. I've always known that, but I think this pandemic life has made me reawaken to that.

There's more. So much more, but in the end, there will be a day I want to remember again. So, I'll keep my good memories safe. Though I can't say I'll return a call again after being ghosted, ignored, treated as such, and then blocked on social media. We all know that's the ultimate fuck you. When the only thing I'm there for is to vent and have family members berate me, it's not okay. Though, as I wake from the loss, I also look around to people who leave me chasing them, turn the tables and place the blame on me for not seeing them or calling them (when, ya know, they don't bother to initiate), the one who makes you feel small, the ones . . . the ones, that after a year of tangible loss and fear, constantly displace you and your needs. Telling someone, when he or she gets home from the hospital "do you have a plan on how to survive and care for yourself?" is foul. As in, meaning, you can't count on them for anything beyond a text message (and only if it's convenient).

So, yeah, I'm not that open these days. I'm not that trusting. Yet, parts of me are lighter than they've been in years. The heart breaks, as we all know, but it always mends. I can't say it looks the same, as I'm not the same. The scissors were handed to me, and I cut you out. I would imagine they were intended for me to cut myself. In that regard, I changed the game.

I've made no secret that I've been redesigning life, since late 2018. In Jan 2019, after a week in the hospital with double pneumonia, I was frightened to my core. I altered and changed things. This time around the change is not different. Cold and callous, double standards, holding me to higher (and different standards), silence, and sheer disregard aren't something any of us should take as normal. They aren't, on any level. They are just another form of gaslighting. Yet, they are a gaslighting coming from a place deep within that strikes harder than from those you haven't willingly allowed into your sphere.

As we emerge from our cocoons, I can't imagine I'm the only one shocked from my own awakenings of things I've long, secretly known. Yet, even while metaphorically not alone, it still feels that way sometimes. That's a part of life that happens. Being forced alone, in thought and action is a different matter altogether. On that note, as the pages unfold and we all find ourselves again . . .

Cycles. Grieving. Not Forgetting.

2021-01-19T01:16:00.000-05:00

2020. What can’t be said about it? Well, for one, a sense of happiness. The losses of habits, community, and what we thought we needed are one thing. The loss of those we love is another. The first death happened, and I gasped. I kept it to myself and pressed on. When I told people, a few weeks later, the shock hit them . . . a shock for me per se. Mostly, though, there was no acknowledgment. I lost someone, one I had been seeing. On the westside, I moved uptown, and the space and beauty of an apartment were lost as the world froze. As I unpacked my kitchen and posted jokes in a thread about the ice cream truck outside my new place, one of my oldest and closest friends died. Died while we were jesting about the damned ice cream truck. Things that happened with that have stuck with me and soured me. I’ll never mail the letter I had written his wife when it happened, wishing her love and peace. More so, as she is still friends with my mother—of sorts, I guess—and when things fell apart for us, she said nothing. I was told I didn’t deserve to grieve, among other things. To this day, I am trying to grasp what I did wrong. My acknowledgment of his family wasn’t deemed enough, and I was told how I should feel. Not sure if that one will heal. Though, a month later number three happened.

The beginning of August, two days before my parent’s anniversary, my sister passed. Even harder to grasp, her mother waited two weeks to tell us (or anyone from what I can gather). Her body was gone, long cremated, by the time we found out. There was a memorial late that month, in Arizona, and since my Dad wasn’t welcome I wasn’t going alone. At some point, I had been demoted to a step-sister by her mother, and I was her half-sister. As kids, Andy or Vinnita, would have punched you for making an issue of our lineage. They were brutally savage on the fact that all three of us were siblings, not just them, and we have the same Dad. Andy Jr. claimed my mother as his own, and he would have made the biggest stink.

As things go, the numbness bore down deep into my soul. It’s still there; I can’t lie. Vinnita died from liver cancer, and a myriad of complexities accompany her. It still doesn’t feel real. I haven’t grieved her. Not sure when I will. Perhaps I will sooner than not. Or not at all. Most days, I suppress the real fear that I’ll become so used to this newfound only child status that I forget I had siblings. It’s been a lifetime since Andy Jr. has been gone, nearly eighteen years now. There are deeply embedded anger in me, shame, and just damage to the core. To say I miss her is an understatement. In the past, she’d jump rails, vanish, and then she’d resurface five years later. I’d hunt her down once or twice a year, make contact, she’d promise to call, and radio silence always ensued. Usually, about halfway through her cycle, she’d contact Dad. She moved to Arizona with her Mom and didn’t tell my Mom, Dad, or me. She always said she was moving before. Usually, she’d refused to say where, but I always knew in five years she would leave a voicemail in the middle of the night, sent a text, or darken my door. Now . . . I guess all cycles end, things change, and we all move on. Or so I’m told.

After Vinnita, my Aunt Cathy died, well, a cousin as an Aunt, family drama, some family friends died, and one of my mother’s many brothers. By year’s end, I had hit nine. One died pre-pandemic, by his hand, and then less than two months later, the dude who started this story passed. Looking back on last year is like a black hole and hit my entire body. Did I forget someone in there? Might have.

I laid low. I pressed on or tried to do so. I made PPE for the city. I sewed so damned many masks that I hate the sight of them on my sewing table. I donated. I sold. I sewed a near unholy amount. I published an article. Did some edits on the fiction writing. Moved. During the summer, which feels like a dream—a nearly imagined mist from long ago—that is hazy and unfamiliar, I helped my parents get the final load(s) of things from the old house in Virginia to the new place in North Carolina. I got a dog. Things evolved. It’s funny how we can work through depression without working through it.

Parts of me feels like I wasted a year. Parts of me are so numb I could care less.* Parts of my are starting to feel again.

*In light of someone attempting to mansplain to me a few weeks ago on “I could care less” the correct way to state it is either “could care” or “couldn’t care.” Why, yes, can you tell that someone was unkind? The link is here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/could-couldnt-care-less

Standing Still In Time

2020-03-27T02:56:00.002-04:00

It's been a while, is an understatement. Then again, those who know me remember last year. 2019 entered with double pneumonia and quarantine for a false TB scare, a month later I broke my foot and double tore the plantar fascia, the hits kept coming, and in December I had surgery to repair the foot and ended the year with influenza. Last year tried my soul, nearly killed me, and I was barely standing when it ended. Damn. I shut myself down, and I compartmentalized to survive, to find a laugh, to capture a sight, and to carry-on. Then, by late February, I was finally coming out of the ashes, getting life back, moving again. I got back into shoes and some heels, made it back to pole dancing classes, but then the world stopped.

COVID-19 hit. Well, it came. Hard. First, the suburbs of Seattle--my first hometown--and then it grew. Now, as the world knows, NYC is the US epicenter, and Queens is the epicenter of the epicenter. I live here. I call this ten-story town home. I can't sleep at night, as I'm restless from the silence of the streets. I hear the ambulances, growing in number these days. I see the EMTs with protective gear and masks. I know where the patients are going. I wonder if any of them are part of the growing death toll. I compartmentalize and struggle to breathe. I avoid stopping long enough to let anything settle.

On the 11th, I taught my last in-person class. Campuses were shuttered, the NY Governor made the final (and late call) to make the last city and state colleges and universities close. I came home, slightly rattled and unnerved. I slept for nearly two days. How odd. How telling. I would wake up and read endless emails and fall asleep again. I would send a text, half-awake, and then go back to sleep. I remember drinking water, taking my daily gremlins, and eating some crackers at one point. The apartment was dark. Was it night out, or was it merely because the curtains and blinds were pulled?

And there you have it. I'm scared. To the bone. Lupus and RA. Gut issues. Asthma, chronic sinus infections, and bronchitis make COPD. Inhalers and pills. Being a high-risk candidate for a mysterious, fast, and forceful, invasive virus is not a medal you want to win. The email from NYU Langone advising me to stay put and avoid public settings didn't exactly fall on silent nerves.

I last taught on the 11th, like I said. I slept. On that Saturday, I hit up the Union Square Greenmarket late in the day, and I finally caught up with my wine guy. It was lovely and beautiful. I bought a handful of bottles. Two table grape, two desert ones, and a blush. Patrice convinced me on the blush, as I'm not really a blush girl. It goes well with dinner, I will say. I didn't go dancing that Friday, as the Colorado bestie begged me to stay away for a month or so. On Saturday, things were quiet, and people were missing (by NYC standards). On Sunday, I did a grocery shop. I'm on delivery, as even the governor has ordered patients like me to stay inside and such.

All of that being said, the pressure of this pandemic and life is startling. I compartmentalize well, as that's probably why I'm either not sleeping or sleeping for hours while waking up non-stop these days. Never feeling rested is the key to my current situation. I live alone with my two orchids, books, memories, and me. The texts ring and a weekly Zoom session with a colleague to knit, gossip, and maybe discuss pedagogy and academic discourse settle the gypsy soul never stationary and never quiet. I called Jen when NY when on its shelter at home order. We are 21st-century gals and find phone calls a fresh hell. Calling is a shocking reminder of reality and place. My whats app, my email, and my social media ring with messages and alerts.

I'm angry and shocked and stunned. China's population is four times ours, and we had a warning. However, we have now surpassed the number of cases in the world. But those are matters for another discussion.

The youngest girl calling me Auntie is eleven. She's having the hardest time, we think, as she's breaking down near nightly. Last weekend was the first time since Ingy was three, there wasn't a leotard to wash. Last week was the first time since she was three, her Mom hasn't sent me a picture of video of her athletic prowess. She doesn't have practice for near twenty hours a week, her network is upended. She, like us, is struggling to adapt and conform to the new world order. In a series of texts, I told her I was stir crazy and was headed out for solitary walking in the final hours New York still had non-essential shops open. I asked if she wanted pics of my 'hood, and she said, "sure." I haven't sent them yet, and I certainly will. Before I do, here are some moments of life standing still. Hearts on hold. Dreams undone, frozen, waiting in time, without a due date.

Scenes of the usually bustling intersection, filled with life, horns, and chatter. Near dead silent, on a Sunday. Standing there, I wondered how many people would have ever thought they'd see NYC streets like they are now.

A reflection of my self, in the window of my favorite coffee shop (in this 'hood). It had just been renovated. Bubble teas and lattes are on hold until the sun runs the other way, I presume.

Restaurants shuttered to take out only, shocking the NYC soul with empty tables and no bartenders. And libraries with books no one can access.

Empty sidewalks, space to spread out, to walk alone in your own thoughts and solitude. A onetime luxury and dream. Now . . . now a daily reality.

I was asked today how I am, "really" is what the text said. How am I, I wonder? The solitude of solitude wears down on you at times. You find yourself wondering what to do next. I don't slow down, and I'm afraid of stopping. If I do, I'm not sure what will happen. Will I collapse? Will I let it all sink in and breakdown?

I've lost most, if not all, of my summer income already. I'm gasping, but I'm refusing to stop and think. I have a flight to Athens for mid-June and a ticket from Athens to Thessaloniki for the next day. I'm set to be a speaker for two days. I'm set to return to Athens for two months. I've been looking at apartments. I have notes, plans, and agendas. For my birthday Tanfer was set to fly into Athens, and then she and I were going to head to Rhodes for me to do some more of my research and for us to have a drink in the Aegean Sea as I turn 44 and celebrate her turning it a couple months before me. First World problems concerning grant awards and stalled research are the least of my worries right now. I haven't admitted that Greece is most likely on hold, as I still believe in miracles and magic sometimes. Now, it is undoubtedly a time to believe.

Tanfer and I might have to wait to drink in the sea, and Elisabetta and I may have to wait a year to ride a few ferries and island-hop for a long weekend. Naxos was the plan, as years ago, a friend told me about it. He called it his dreamland. That was long before I began this project, began drafting and pitching articles and agreeing to write scripts for a webcast. Now, all of those are on hold, as the tides are frozen . . . unlike the sea that continually moves without hesitation for care. All the viruses in the world have yet to freeze the sea, kinda like dreams. They might be on hold, yet they don't stop. Now, we dream of things so common yesterday they would have been a fool's laugh.

I may joke that I survived the satan's bowels of hell of 2019, and a virus named after a beer isn't going to take me down, especially after surviving all the Everclear I drank in the '90s, but that is all it is. I'm not riding the subway, deepthroating subway poles as I told students in what became our final class, and I'm staying in. I walk alone, at times when fewer than few are out. I see in open curtains, endless streams of Netflix, and streaming. My personal favorite is the porn flowing these days. People forget, I guess, that we can see in those windows in a lockdown. I'm told Pornhub gave New Yorkers a month free, and I can tell you I believe it is being used from the looks of these bedroom and living room windows. I guess everyone has to find a way to cope. There's going to be a lot of pandemic babies and divorces when this is over.

I sew. I've fixed pincushions I made seven to eight years ago, extended pillow shams I made a decade ago, finished a blazer I got disgusted with and left hanging, made some intricate faces for a class proposal I'm working on, mended a handful of things for a friend, did more sewing for the business than I can possibly fathom, deep cleaned my bookshelves, dusted all the wall art, deep cleaned my toaster oven (it looks new), scrubbed my bathroom fixtures and floor a new level of white, made a baseball tee, organized a closet, swapped out seasonal clothes, organized the main room, almost cleared my desk off and out (holy shit, I know), caught up on emails, paid some bills, left some others overdue to wait a bit more, started to write again, graded, made some bras (which the irony is I don't wear them while working from home, so they sit in the drawer dreaming of a day they'll see light or a man again), made a messenger bag with leather and alterations, and the list goes on. That was all in a week and a half. I need to pace myself.

I've made a contingency plan, as frightening as it is. I have to, as I live alone. I have me. When the odds are that 70 to 80 percent of us are going to get this virus, and then you add the death toll in there, the numbers make your stomach fall. Think of your ten closest friends . . . hell, not even that. Think of your people, tribe, person per se. Tanfer, Betta, Jen, and me. Three of gets it. Which one dies? Did you feel some vomit in your throat? Did your stomach lurch? Did your eyes get watery?

I live in a First-World nation, the richest. Yet, I sew masks for friends as they've asked for them. They have no gear to protect them as the treat patients, and the rest of us are left to wonder what will happen if we end up on one of those ambulances we hear in the night. When we get to the hospital, already overcrowded and overrun, will we walk out or be rolled out to a final resting place?

And that's where I am at. Dreaming of Greece, of when this ends, of fresh flowers again (as it now the first time since I left Richard, I don't have a dose of them). Praying my health stays stable and solid, that my inflammations don't increase. Praying that by some magic of fate, no one connected to my heart falls prey, even more, that none of them meet their maker in the run of this beast. Maybe I'll date again, perhaps I won't. I'm solo, as usual, as there was someone, and then he vanished in the night. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one, as months and plans and chasing the girl when she said no . . . I'm living alone, during a pandemic. I'm carrying on with my usual voice and sense of obnoxious space. Yet, I'm not okay. I'm not okay at all, but I don't have a choice. If I don't make the coffee, cook the eggs, and do the dishes, no one will. If I don't take out the trash, the roaches will come. If I don't put one foot in front of the other, I will have nothing but unfinished projects, perhaps a failed legacy, and dreams left undone in the wake.

The View from Ten

2019-09-29T19:59:00.001-04:00

It's been a while it seems. February, when I was in the throes of a broken foot and a doubly ruptured plantar fascia. In all this time, I've thought about writing, longed to, and yet . . . I wrote for other places, I wrote for books, I wrote in my mind. I stopped time, in many ways.

2019 has been brutal to me. It's been an unending barrage of punches to the face and gut. As I type this now, I shiver a little wondering what will happen next. Will the universe serve me another blow? What insult and injury awaits me this week? I hold my breath.

In the fires of memory, I spent a large portion of August in Colorado. Per usual, I found myself footing myself up and down mountainsides, and most pointedly, I made it 3/4 of the way down an expert level hike in Black Canyon. I didn't make it all the way as lupus and asthma said hello, more than once, and my sister from another mother and father--Jen--and I agreed that wrecking myself to make it up and down was not an option. She was openly afraid that the National Park rangers would have to airlift me out of the canyon base, or more profoundly she feared my Dad killing her if I was either injured or dead from the trek. In our forties, there are still points of departure, fear, and angst. We all have them, even if you don't want to admit it.

While in Denver, the youngest agnostic daughter came bounding in from art camp with two portraits. One of me and one of her. She didn't get to finish me, but that doesn't matter.

A ten-year-old's view of herself.

When I saw me, I stood and gasped. The reddish hair, frazzled about, is spot on. The pasty white skin, as she couldn't finish me, matches me more than not. Yet, the mid-drift showing made me gasp. And then I felt myself relax as the internal voice in my head reminded me that she sees me as such. I'm still a little blown back.

Me. In the eyes of a ten-year-old.

As many women (or is most?), I look at my myself in the mirror or pictures and cringe at elements of my shape and person. My biceps are certainly not shapely, and I've never been comfortable with the form of my ass or the way my gut settles. Yet, I logically know I'm smaller in weight and pants sizes these days, yet the struggle remains. The loss of more weight is recommended, but a trope of drugs I eat for meals or snacks (depending on your take) lock weight on me like an overprotective father towering over his daughter tucked away behind a padlock. Even more so, my body routinely fails me (as this year has been a testament of epic proportions). I push the boundaries, and I wreck myself with guilt that I workout routinely, and I still lack core strength and a socially acceptable body shape.

Breaking the boundaries. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. When you need a wilderness permit, you know your hike is one for the books. When there's a chain on the trail, you know that the word steep is an understatement.

Perhaps the relationship that vanished into a winter night's cold air, without cause or warning, still shakes me. Maybe it was the comment that I'm fun, and happy (even too comfortable in my ease and jovial nature, and I am still confused about that one), but I'm not the type to take out. I heard something about not looking the part. I look in the mirror and see my face and frame and wonder, now as I did a few months back, what that means. I have a catchphrase of "things men say to me." That one surpasses that phrase by leaps and bounds. There was another one who was even more crass, having left char marks after a few evenings. I wonder why I try. Yet, then I think back to that ten-year-old who--like me--often takes up all the air in the room upon entry.

She bounded in, proud and elated, at her drawing. I was touched to my core; I still am, to be honest. I think of our bike rides. I think of my still being in a brace on my foot (as I am now), and I remember reaching for an emergency inhaler hit as I felt my lungs wheeze. I remember her asking me if I had my inhaler when we left the house. I remember her saying, "I'm glad you stopped for that." I remember our chatter on our bike rides and other adventures. I remember, and never forget, that she's a gymnast competing in Junior Olympic meets. She makes most adults look bad at athletics. Yet, when together it all erases to make us on the same level.

I wonder why other factors of my life aren't so kind.

As I sit here in a pair of cut off overalls, scrounged from my Mom's closet purge this summer, the fan hums. I'm in a camisole and those 20+-year-old overalls that are too big, with a do-rag, and not caring what the world thinks today. I walked around the 'hood earlier. Memories of her portrait echoed in my mind as I bounded along the uneven sidewalks of Queens. When I left the house, I momentarily thought about putting on a shirt (a real one per se). I did not. Why?

When "I" sees me as closer to fit and fun than not, then why shouldn't I?

Days

2019-02-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

The snow falls, daffodils bought last week droop from the mason jar long wilted, dried flowers--from the fall--still stand in another mason jar providing another touch of me in this space as dried bouquets have long intrigued me, the lone orchid stands dying as a reflection of my mood and life as of late, my foot aches in the backdrop, and music no one wants to listen to plays. Sad songs. Moods and memories.

In the shower, I notice a new bruise on my shoulder. I wonder when it came to be, where it came from, and why I didn't see until now. Did I do that in my sleep? Was it someone on a crowded subway? It's the wrong shoulder for my handbag. I wash my hair and forget about it.

Riddled with aches of Lupus and arthritis I do yoga in my studio. I can't make it out for a run, as my post-pneumonia lungs are still reminding me of things of I should not do, and pole dance is planned for Friday. I play mixed songs, of a favorite playlist in the background, and somewhere along the way, I find myself landing on my right foot with more weight than I thought. I hear a pop; I feel a pain. I find ice and go back to grading. A bruise, I can identify, forms. It fades in a few days, and if I'm careful, I can walk just fine in specific shoes. A few days later the pain reminds me of life and loss, as I wake up from a dead sleep wondering what the hell has taken over my right foot. The large toe begins to sing it's own tune, in parallel to the arch. Did I trip? I might have. I don't remember. Was I standing on my toes, in long lost ballerina ways, to see a tall man's eyes or notes in his hand? I think so. I think there was a crack, but I don't remember. Or maybe it was that piroutte I did in class the day before. Did I smack into the podium again? No, I haven't done that one in a while.

Breaking down, in the snow, as the pain leaves me hobbling along like a cripple I venture to an urgent care. An x-ray later I find one broken bone, initially said to be on the wrong toe. In the end, it's not a toe at all. It's the sesamoid bone, and it hurts. Prescription pain pills are involved. A week later praying I'd only sprained my arch--as that's what it always is right?--an Ultrasound shows one ruptured plantar fascia. It knocks me back, in a way. It's all starting to settle in now, after a whiskey last night. I consider, again and again, how much long term steroids have to do with such a volatile injury from such low impact action.

I look on last night and wonder why I didn't have more. Lord knows I didn't have enough to aide in sleep. I didn't have enough to warm the shock, quell the ache, or make me momentarily forget. Instead, one drink later, a 1:30 am attempt to sleep finally settles in, and then I clicked on Pinterest through the wee hours of the night wondering how I got here.

Then again, last night was the bridge to today; that annual day I disappear and try to hide my mental health disparity. It's the day he died, my brother, that is. Last year, the fifteen-year mark, knocked the wind out of me. I wrote a long piece, on Facebook, from my phone that bridge night poetically musing about how a lifetime had passed, books and articles, men and lovers, one divorce, and that my heart still remembered. This year my heart still remembers, and as if the universe was waiting on deck to either comfort or startle me a song I hadn't heard shook me. Crooning about calling a number, that no longer belongs to his dead father. I stop in my tracks, in my kitchen while cooking polenta, and breathe in deep. I remember calling his number, long after he passed.

Once, a couple of years after, I dialed Andy's number and a woman answered. It jolted me awake, as I was half in a dream and woke thinking I owed him a ring. I sat there wrapped in my covers for an elongated moment holding my phone wondering what happened to me. There was another time, a couple of glasses of wine in, I called after someone I spent the better part of twelve years having an off and on again love-hate relationship with ended it with me. In all honesty, that was not wine. It was bourbon. There was so much bourbon that night with no ice as it was a straight up kind of sorrow, and--sadly--it wasn't the last time we ended our tryst. Instead, it hit me the most that night. I still remember that ache. The scar still lives. A man answered Andy's number. I was shocked into momentary half sobriety. On a friend's deck, as I had his house for the summer, the night air--that July--blanketed me and the ship horns in Port Jefferson acted like a musical melody to my melancholy. The next day that man called me back, to see if I was okay, and I apologized (again) telling him he had my brother's old number and in a moment I forgot. He had lost a brother too, and he said he knew that empty pain. We laughed and hung up parting ways. That was the last time I dialed Andy, about five years after he was gone. I've never let that detail out before.

I've long forgotten Andy's old number.

This week I wish I had him around to call and bemoan how much my foot hurts. He'd be an ass, but he'd make me laugh that I am sure. We were good with each other like that. Then again, writing about the past and memory tends to elevate the good and displace the bad. Tonight I sip a slightly bougie version of Woodchuck, as Pearsecco Cider mellows my tastebuds and chords of memory this year. I contemplate adding bourbon into my mix, but instead, I sit here pontificating about the cruel year I'm seeing and memories gone by.

The white shroud fell today, a gentle fall. Wet, drippy snow-covered Gotham, and while I didn't venture out I looked around thinking just as the universe jolted me with that ditty of memory it comforted me with the stark white and sheer cold. Years ago, my Mom told me that snow was God's comfort. She said that as I cried my heart and eyes out at my best friend's funeral; I've always remembered that the snow fell as the service started and Mom commented. Just as I remember that note, I remember him. When Dad put Andy's ashes in the water, it snowed, rained, and hailed. I was the one who got the snow. It was snowing the night he died. The universe certainly has a way of walking with us.

And with that, I tinker at my table, sew a skirt--a pattern long made and done--and sing along to those mellow songs. None of them are ones he loved and sang as we drove I-95 south or around the small town my parents live in, as I can't go there (even now). I grade. I still haven't put away my washed laundry or cleaned off my chair, but I did make the bed. I see a damned spider and turn the back half of my apartment into a toxic waste zone with a can of Raid, while always remembering his penchant for putting spiders in my sock drawer and bed. A friend, with two younger brothers, found that fact hilarious a few weeks back. I tell him he is a boy and would, as I tell him he should expect to peel me off the ceiling and hold me if one appears while he's with me. He laughs, saying I'm "just like a woman."

That I am. Just like a woman. With a heart. With emotions. With memories. Jaded by life. Guarded to the last hours. Protective to my own destruction.

The days evolve, just as they always do. Even in the dark there's a glimmer of hope and light. These days I wonder what that is, more and more, and I struggle to stay ahead of the curve, keep my happy--or at least fake in it in public--and . . . we all go on. One more day. One more run. One more circle around the sun.

Restless Smiles and Daffs

2019-02-10T21:23:00.002-05:00

Perhaps it is this time of year. Perhaps. Though, this time of year typically means I've bought myself daffodils. Ironically, I did not buy them in the rain this year. Someone told me a few weeks back I was very Wadsworth with the daffodils. Perhaps. The English Major for Life in me wants to agree with his own English degree self, but the feminist in me wants to knee gut that shit.

I think I'll step back and take the romantic imagery of Wadsworth instead.

"A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

Indeed, probably one of the more famous poems of the language I type in. "I Wandered Lonely on a Cloud" was one I recited back in my undergrad days for a lit professor I once had. All that was a lifetime ago, scores and hundreds of daffodils purchased have come and gone.

As another arctic vortex swoops in, threatening to freeze me in my solitary existence overnight, I sit here and shiver under my fleece and fuzzy socks. As I've noted around before, that alone is the real cardio of winter. Shiver, shiver — putter from one end of the railroad studio to the other. Proofread a few sentences, try to avoid another typo. Shiver, shiver. Be brave and check the scale. Nearly faint when you see how low it is these days. Wonder if there's a ream of cookies hidden in the house, and then jolt yourself sane knowing that you'd have to bake said cookies to have them. Momentarily think about how the oven will make the place toasty, and then stop yourself knowing that eating a couple dozen cookies will not enable the too big skinny jeans to sag much longer. Contemplate that some more, stub your toe shuffling about, and come out of the haze most certainly worse for the wear.

Shiver under a blanket, while tinkering on failing projects, and briefly think about dating again. Attempt said dating. Collect more bizarre statements from men along the way, go out with one--a couple of times--to learn he's a psycho in a plaid button up. High-five yourself for not shagging him. He wasn't that interesting anyway, and he was a finance guy. Heh. Remember an advisor once told you, "Annessa, you need to find an educated man. One with an artistic side, as you--my friend--will never do well with a finance man." It was said with such panache and finesse that I still can feel the air swirl from his hand movements. Though, I can not argue with his assessment as I have never gelled well with the finance crowd. Then, or now, as a calamity of horror and comedy filled dates have shown.

Attempt to throw yourself into a run to remember you're still coming off pneumonia wearies, as you clutch your chest and wonder if this is what the end feels like. You then throw yourself into yoga--a practice you've never liked--to only pull a muscle in your arch leaving a bruise and a limp. Eat a few migraine pills in there, and realize the searing pain in your neck dissipates with those. You put two and two together, high-five yourself, saying they don't call you doctor for nothing. A week later think the foot feels okay and that the head is pacified and try to throw yourself into kickboxing to find yourself wailing on the floor. Thankfully, you were at your apartment on an exercise video queue. Pour yourself a drink, as that you can do well. Sit on your floor, in a pair of running pants that are sliding off, sipping said cocktail. Decide to venture into the shoebox closet and see if there are workout pants that you can hold up without ducktape, and they are on the back of the shelf you need to stand on a chair to get to .* Find a pair of college sweats, toss them on, and then dance around as they are loose. Text an old college friend that your panties and sweats are too big, have her tell you you need to get to laid. You respond with something about has she seen your dates lately, and she returns with something about they make things for that now. You volley back with something about high rates of breakage and fearing getting on a watch list for those, and you can't put the rest here because your Mom tends to read these pages. I'll let you imagine, as you blush from my innuendos.

Yet, I'm a little restless. Restless from winter, from waiting, from a level of pain higher than before I was on Benysta for six or so months. My Marilyn pills are in a state of flux, not going down by any means, and they aren't making the personal life any easier either. C'est la vie. So restless it is. Writing in the wee hours, writing between moments, writing for hopes again. As the story goes.

Daffs are in bloom though. There's always a reason to smile amid the endless, grey days of the frozen winter tundra.

*Mom, I was totally on a ladder for that. A sturdy, well-made ladder.

Things I did this week.

2019-01-18T21:20:00.000-05:00

As January is only eighteen days in, and I'm failing at life and 2019, I sit here wondering when the swells of damage will subside. Perceptions will always fool you.

In seven days:

I lost one of my emergency contacts as she made it clear she wanted to know my contingency plan. Well, it was never for her to take care of me. So, I won't bother her again. That one rips me to my core as I've never asked anyone to take care of me. I'm done being there for people, as in the end . . .
Had someone comment, more than once, that we've known each other for a long time. Well, we've known each other so long that he lied to my face. Even more: he doesn't know me. At all. He doesn't know my brother's name, my favorite color or flower, doesn't know that he's a big reason the occasional date usually ends as a dud as the dude across the table falls flat in comparison. He doesn't know I still remember the day he told me to call him by his first name and not title. He doesn't know the hell of my own soul. He doesn't know I still remember that day he said "I love you." I still remember my own shock. He doesn't know the damage from him. From life. From every bad decision I've ever made.

Made a new bra pattern, as I can barely move but I can only stay stationary so long. With the last remnants of silk scrap, I lined it with purple bra fabric (scrap from another), and used scraps of trim and lace . . . If you sew, see the Harriet Bra, from Cloth Habit, and know I did a DD in my band size and it fits like a dream. I haven't had a man want to be near me since last summer so my saying it feel better than man hands probably means less than I think it should.

In the course of a conversation, dude wants to know what I do for a living . . . At some point, he wanted to make sure I wasn't a shrink. I told him I'm a writer and professor, for which he said you teach English. I responded, rather emphatically, "Fuck no, I have a Ph.D. in history, cultural theory, and gender!" Him: "So you're a feminist. You hate men." Two points to that: teaching English isn't bad. It's a noble life, but he meant it in another way. Secondly, being a feminist doesn't say I hate men. I have no words.

Someone else, whom I was talking to in December, resurfaced. He wants to meet for a drink and take me to Liberty Inn. Wanna know what that one is? I won't link it here, but it's a pay by the hour hotel. I'd like to think I write pretty good fiction, but this shit I couldn't even make up.

I went to the allergist that the hospital insisted I see. In the course of that, I learned that the hospital thought I was lying. Yeah, I'm lying about antibiotic allergies that are well documented, and the primary care physician I've had has seen said allergies in person. Yes, I lie about red pepper allergies that cause anaphylaxis shock because I really enjoy this complicated life (if you can't see sarcasm I can't help you). The allergist said it was a waste of my time since there is no test for antibiotics . . . As she said if you ever need penicillin (as it's the only option) tell them you'll need to be desensitized. That requires an ICU and an allergist. I won't be doing that anytime soon. I'm so glad I got to waste more of my time and money. I was the idiot single female who found herself admitted, via the ER, on a holiday weekend. Doesn't matter if the stay was a week, I'm still just another single female who clearly just wants attention otherwise I would have stayed home. I often think I should just stay home. Maybe I'll get a puppy and then the howls of the dog can alert the neighborhood of my demise.

Got rejected from some fiction publications, but I was told to resubmit with praise. I have no words, as it makes no sense to me.

Broke down and paid fifteen dollars for a bottle of cough syrup, as the regular ones weren't cutting it. I bought that all natural, no drugs, let's commune with nature Zarbee's. Here's the thing: It smells like a floral and honey armpit (yes, I smelled it), and it tastes like a hippie threw up in your mouth. But, sweet baby Jesus that shit works. I still cough, but I'm not hacking half the night anymore. Only a third. That's a win. Though, today hardly at all. Good signs.

I put on a ton of makeup and faked it for a few pictures. As, years ago when we were young, my quiet, nerdy cousin Micah married a girl named Carol. Carol, one of twelve I think, has a handful of sisters. One, Jane, is a painter. She paints jeans, and in October she painted me a pair of sunflower ones. Anyone who has ever known me knows sunflowers and me go hand in hand like the hills of Tuscany. Life, Lupus, and my body didn't let me wear these until now . . . Her little place is Art Gallery Jeans; My pair were around 175, which--in all honesty--feels like a steal as a Picasso sunflower is far, far more.

If you're wondering, that's my Carrie Scarf from a couple of years ago (the hat pattern is here, as I knitted that too). I still love it and no you can't have it. I also prob gave myself another bought of hell being outside sans coat for about ten minutes. At this point, what does it all matter anyway?

I seriously want to be a jackal and go back to Amsterdam in these jeans . . . just to flounce around in the Picasso Museum again. I would tell you I don't do stuff like that, but there's a video of me singing in ancient amphitheaters in Turkey and Bulgaria, and there's evidence of me dancing in Austrian Alp fields (for which you already can figure what I was singing). I probably sang ABBA in Greece. I have no shame.

Jane's got a sweet Instagram too. If you're wondering, I'm dying for a pair of cherry blossom ones, but that's gonna be a few months. Things like copays and prescriptions take priority. And, as I said to my Mom when she noted how lively I look, "I fake things well." I still feel like hell about fifty percent of the time, and one hundred percent of the time I'm in various stages of pain and exhaustion. Life is what it is.

Came close to ending all of my medical treatments. I'm still close, as I'm done being lied to and having to beg for care. I'm also done depleting every resource I have to pay for this life, and then still having nothing at the end of the day. As I've already noted, every ounce of me hurts, and there's little end in sight.

Took up tutoring again, as a subcontractor via a large company, that grossly cuts the wage and pays me near nothing. What I'll make tomorrow, for two hours (well four and a half after round trip subway) will be around four or so days of groceries. I'm just thrilled to be humiliated on another level.

Someone, whom I didn't expect and (and as she says) barely knows me, sent soup in the mail. There's a company that will send homemade soup, socks, and a ladle. It was all very sweet.

I certainly don't feel like I have anything, especially after this week. On that note, my pulmonary doctor told me I could have a drink. He said that last week. I finally had one cider last night, and tonight I'm having one cider with a shot of Pama liquor in it. I'm out of fucks, and with that note I'm going to try and write another agent and work on a novel chapter. These days I wonder why I still bother trying. Yet, like a fool I do.

Outline the Heartache.

2019-01-13T00:48:00.000-05:00

I stopped writing for a while. Well, here I did. Writing, though, is a daily occurrence. There's a new novel in the works, even though I'm still committing guerilla warfare on trying to find an agent. Or something like that. More like they are committing omission by silence or bizarre notes of "we love what we read, but we can't take you." Sounds like the story of my life. Always. Auto, rinse, repeat.

There's a new academic piece coming out next month, or this. . . Depending on the press's literal press. There's a new academic piece, part of the forthcoming monograph I have a soft offer on, coming out next fall. My last monograph should hit paperback next month. There's a short story under final review. Wouldn't that be grand? The one aspect of my life I haven't broken into the publishing world on that I always said was what I wanted to do.

As of recent, I'm waking up from seven days in the hospital with pneumonia. There's something I'd never recommend, especially with five of those days in isolation from a stupid TB scare. The nightmares of a kitchen that couldn't understand an allergy to everything in the red pepper family, to PAs telling me they couldn't read my primary care physician's notes (what the holy hell there) and that I had to contact him, to a resident trying to send me home about eight hours after I was admitted saying I didn't have pneumonia and I didn't need to be there (there was a comment that I should see a therapist), to pulmonary saving me (for lack of a better word) an hour later, to finally losing my shit four days in from a migraine (that I still have) and living on less than 500 calories a day. I lost five pounds though, from someone who slept without help while there and didn't leave bed for four days that says something. The first three I don't really remember. I do remember some, and I've seen elongated texts messages I sent. The girls who called me Auntie wished me Happy New Year and were sad I was in the hospital. I cried a little. I thought the texts I sent were instant. Instead, they were hours and minutes apart. I'd wake, write, pass out. Auto, rinse, repeat. 'Tis the nature of my life. Yet, my father didn't wish me Happy New Years, and I found out why later. There's a way to feel your heartbreak, as the actions of others cut you like a knife.

All of that being said, life breaks you. As we all know. Some, more than others. I will never understand what the hell I have done, but in the end, I know that actions will forever speak louder than words. The person who sent a message on New Year's Eve wanting help, even addressing knowledge he knew I was ill. I was in the fucking hospital. My response: "Embrace the crowds and figure it out." Yeah. NYC is crazy on New Year's Eve. Don't ask me about crowds. Certainly, don't ask me for mundane aid when I'm in a hospital bed.

The person who should have messaged when I was in the hospital, going in with atypical and typical pneumonia (since having one wasn't enough), and waited a week . . . claiming she didn't know. That's a bunch of bullshit, and after all of these years, I'm done. Break my heart, after I've defended and stood up for her. Been there. Always reached out. In the end, I guess I always knew it would end like this. Don't ask me to get over it anytime soon. The anger is long dead, like my twenties and men I mistakenly loved. Instead, the void remains. Actions that happened during that week. . .things I hope to one day forget. The person who thinks it is appropriate to make jokes about my recovering from pneumonia . . . Yeah, if someone did to that them, well . . . I have no words.

As time has gone on, I've come to learn that people aren't just not not good people. Instead, they are bad people with several embracing being terrible. The amount of horrible people in my life appear to be growing.

In the midst of it all, I didn't have to apologize for having Lupus this time. Instead, I had departments and colleagues reach out. I'm a little blown away, as I've never had that before. Offers of food, deliveries of groceries, and offers for taking- out are touching, to say the least. The sting, and shame, of apologizing for having Lupus in 2014 has not left me. I'm sure that physician mentioned above still remembers it. I did so as I needed the paycheck. In the end, that place damaged me and my career. The Lupus and Arthritis life has never helped either. That's a different story, for another day.

As I tinker away my days, barely working as the exhaustion is strong and God has taken aim at me as of late, the elongated solitude does little for my soul. Those infusions, of Kate Spade straw Pepto drinks and unicorn tears, are out for a while. As to how long, I do not know. One physician who says he's going to find the answer as another remains silent and avoids a call. One whom I think I can trust. One whom I'm not going to beg for his care as he's made it clear that appointments with me are secondary, as he'll walk out to take a call or answer a text. Gold plated health insurance aside, one that pays for nearly everything, still eats you alive with copays. I'm out these days out of money, savings, retirement, and hope. I'm always left to wonder how much I am not really worth it, as actions remind me . . .

In the midst of it all, you find yourself falling apart in a physician's office. I didn't see that one coming. Though, I guess I should have.

I am doing this alone and doing infusions alone. Being stood up for them, when I needed someone two infusion rounds, bruised an already dark soul. I've long known to never ask anyone for anything, even if I've long been there for them. I make jokes. I have bits I do for the nurses. In the end, I'm the one still sitting there trying not to lose my cookies as I know I've long outlived predictions made on me and endless reminders of people let me know what is thought of me. The chemicals, protected from the light, go in. The steroids and painkillers, in endless bottles, bounce around. In the end, they all fail me at some point just like a cheap, drugstore mascara. This time, I also gave my mother pneumonia as she spent three days in the hospital, going in after me (and coming home before me). There's a special feeling for that too.

On my final day at the hospital, an ex-pat friend of mine came to see me. He was days away from heading back to Germany, and since I was no longer contagious (or in isolation), it was safe for him. Two others offered, but one has small children, and the nurses all said the risk was too high for her. The other: she just moved here from half a world away. The risk was too great for her too, and we know each other from Instagram and that would have been entirely too much to meet someone as such. So, a handful of texts and one visitor. My flowers are still alive, from William that ex-pat I know. We met in Bulgaria, a couple of years ago. Perhaps he barely knows me or knows me just enough.

The days are long but do not outlive the heartache.

White Girl Bougie

2018-11-12T01:52:00.002-05:00

As the air chills, well freefall to six degrees above freezing, I find myself drinking tea in my favorite NYC cup with fuzzy socks on and my favorite university pullover. My hair is up in a messy bun, and since I'm not planning on washing it tonight, the said style should make it bouncy for tomorrow. Or . . . Or it will be a dry shampoo Monday, which sets an entirely new tune for the week.

You probably think I'm listening to rap and white girl rolling it out. Not today, my friends. It's late on a Sunday. Sunday's are no place for rap. Mondays, now, are a different story. Instead, I've got an even whiter mix of mellow and slow songs going that I've had on repeat for two days. I make no apologies, as sometimes we just need the same twenty songs to move us along. Sometimes.

This is all sounding pretty white bougie right now. I probably shouldn't tell you I had a gluten-free blueberry bagel this morning, toasted with cultured cashew butter. Ok, I know. I should just cash in my cool card, but--ya know--ya gotta do what ya gotta do. For the record, on that cashew butter: you have to get cultured, as that is what makes it good. For dinner, there was gluten-free quinoa pasta with vegan alfredo sauce (i.e., onions and shallots, garlic salt, olive oil, walnuts, mustard, gluten-free soy sauce, and nutritional yeast. Oh yeah, don't forget the vegan chicken broth made from ethical and sustainable sources). I sauteed some yellow and orange peppers, baby portabella mushrooms, rainbow carrots, and English peas. Yeah, the bougies saw me coming this week didn't they?

Really shouldn't tell you the cleaner I've been using is apple cider and pumpkin scented organic stuff, huh? I know. Street creed is gone. Just gone.

That being said, life has been long as of late. Long and numb and sleep deprived as the insomnia is awake and the drugs don't work. Remember that old Verve song? Just like that. Perhaps it is this virus I have brewing. Perhaps the Benlysta said fuck you. Perhaps I've got an inflammation raging that needs more than the locker of drugs I'm already on. Perhaps the new drug's side effects are outweighing everything else. All I know is twenty-six years doesn't make this easier, and in the end, I'm still the one who has to figure out how to make it through the day, week, and moment. Hence, these days I've been making sure I cook more.

Cooking is an easy escape of half an hour or so, cutting and chopping, washing dishes, making something. It's a release for the most part. Then again, it's a good reason to run arthritis riddled hands under hot water. Makes you forget for a moment.

In the moments in-between I eased into a movie seat and watched A Star Is Born. Aside from the millennial next to me who A) decided to sprawl her body into my chair and on me (um, personal space, woman!) and B) who apparently didn't like Bradley Cooper (why go see a movie of his?) and saw herself touching Lady Gaga instead (seriously, every time he touched her she uttered "Ugh, I can't stand him touching her.") it was a legit flick. Of course, as I write this melancholy piece, I am reminded that the damned thing triggered me. Perhaps that is what brought on the white girl haze . . .

When you find yourself married to an alcoholic, you see flashes of your own life, or maybe that was just me. Years past you forget how bad it was until you don't. The passing out, the embarrassing parts in public. The jealousy. Hell, my now ex-husband was jealous of my doctor. Legit. In my youth moments of a father's drink came back, as these stories tend to parallel our own lives at times. Add that to the drugs not working and my current state of exhaustion and what is either a sinus infection or hell in my nostrils . . . Yeah, there's a mixture of hell-fire and damnation right there. And that takes me back to the air chilling, white girl melancholy, and gluten-free quinoa spaghetti noodles.

Life has been what is it is as of late. I lie awake. I remember to breathe or try to. I spent several hours last week and this week repairing the webpage as it went down twice. I used more hours trying to stay upright when my body is screaming that it can not. I find ways to escape, as we all do. Perhaps that is what it is afterall. Escapes between the perpetual moments. The moments that never seem to end, so we escape for a second along the way.

Mediocracy and Mimosas

2018-11-05T02:13:00.002-05:00

Dating, or failed and semi-failed attempts, still circle the air these days. Of the best of the best, here are a few moments that make you wonder why you bothered to shower, flat iron your hair, or wear heels instead of a pair of hole-riddled college sweats and a wife beater. Instead, the weak nature of humanity--and yourself--seek companionship, and you continue to hate and torture yourself . . . Time and time again.

I've had my share of duds and everything in between, and tonight I broke down and asked an old friend what the fuck is wrong with my profile to attract every asshat clown this side of the Mississippi. He assures me it is not me. I think he's being kind. I still feel like it is me, as it always is. Doesn't help that two weeks ago I found out the dude I've been keeping up long distance texts with since August is a racist, wall supporting, anti-social program fucktard. As the truth unfolded in his ill-punctuated texts, I felt like I was out of my body watching it all unfold on a terrible B film rejected from the Cannes Film festival for being too depressing for the most somber of indie flicks. Even better, and hold onto your wigs, he's brown and wasn't born in the States. What the holy hell indeed. Then again, if this were a short story it would start with "Did I tell you about the time I went out with a dude who wore shoes costing more than my rent? That's NYC rent . . ." Indeed. Needless to say, I'm still blown back by it. Best I can figure is that at three months in it was bite or move on, so gloves came off and I sat there in horror. At least this one didn't call me a hippo.

A month later I still find myself fielding the occasional message from dudes on an app, but mostly I'm still getting unmatched before I can finish typing a hello. Probably doesn't help that I ate the bullet and linked my Instagram account to my profile this week. Oh yeah, I had an infusion on Friday (so aside from the usual dark mood that it gives me for a couple of days) there's also the monthly drinking Pepto from a Kate Spade straw pic floating about.

In case you missed it. And, FYI, don't get the cherry Pepto. It is nastier than near anything I can think of. And, yes, there are many reasons I am alone. Pepto and Kate Spade straws are one (or is that two).

In the midst of that, I got stood up on the street corner as some white guy from Brooklyn conveniently had a work emergency when I was meeting him near his Midtown office. I know a bail on what I don't like when I see it. Even worse, he claimed he was sorry and that he wanted to still meet up . . . But of course, it turned into the feel of letting me meet you at 930 at night, at your place, in the cloak of darkness so that I don't have to be seen with you in public. Yeah, I've had that one before. Like so many other horrors . . .

Did I tell you that a month ago the relationship I have no name for resurfaced, that was after the two tangos from last spring sprang back up from the dead. The sister from another mother and father in Turkey called that one. Well, the sister from another mother and father in Colorado did too. No, I'm not done with my anger, and no I don't know what anything means. What I do know is that things rarely change, and T has long called it emotional manipulation. Probably is. All of it. Maybe one day I'll tell you. Just like maybe one day I'll tell you more about the man with 1800 dollar shoes. It'll probably fall under a title called "Things Men Say to Me."

That leads us to now.

There was the dude who canceled plans with me on Tuesday, and he couldn't understand why I wouldn't meet him for a drink at 930 at night . . . Well, my asshat friend, every half-wit looser knows what that is. Then there was brunch . . . Brunch is brunch, and say what you will it is more of a commitment than coffee and far, FAR less than dinner. It is also a demanding hour that makes you put on a full face as shadows and drinks don't cover that up. Well, mimosas might. If you don't like mimosas with your eggs Florentine then we can't be friends. If you don't like eggs Florentine . . . I 'll forgive you on that part. All my mimosa jesting aside, brunch doesn't make for a bad first date. You get to be casual too, so there's no need for lace tights and stilettos.

Though, recently over mimosas and eggs, I sat listening to a dude conflate about being a writer not writing with justification after justification. Though, in a phone conversation before he had tried to make a joke by asking me what I was writing . . . And then saying "or are we two writers not writing?" Yeah. I had a quick volley to that. Trust me, there is always something being written, and while I get equal parts rejection and torture, there are also ample queries going out . . . And I finished a new short story not long ago. Hence, the dampening lingers of mediocre set in. I'd had my hunches, but as I sat there, I wondered why someone would want to tango with me knowing that I'm not one for justifications and lackluster feels. Yeah, I know. Most people don't understand why I work so hard, so much, and why I bother (most days I wonder, but then bills call . . . and then the dream that all I ever wanted was to write and teach and write fiction . . . ). Yet, there's a linger of mediocrity that I don't understand. The complacency and they need to pull others into yours. I've dated that. I was married to that. See my point?

Yeah, not everyone has to chase their dream but . . . Don't tell me you have a dream, made it once, and then walked away because it was too hard. Maybe I expect too much, then again I've long known I suck the oxygen from the room. Is that why I'm so tired as guys like this one and the one from August found me more charming than I perceived them? Or am I just dead inside? It's probably more on me, as I seem to be the consistent variable.

That being said, here's to before mimosas and the face after in unfiltered digital saves of the day. . . As I typed and squandered an afternoon too achy to ride a bike, as I used all my moxi to drink Pepto on my way to brunch and even more mojo to hide my exhaustion, as my mind is in stop loss mode and my ego is long gone.

Sunday Rides

2018-10-01T01:29:00.001-04:00

I can’t remember when, but years ago—or long ago as the literary vein would muse—I found the ideas of Sunday’s in the park to be romantic and the dream. As for the park, I’m not going to lie ... Central Park it is. Leisurely strolls, bike rides, and perhaps runs always struck me as the ideal, epitome to a weekend’s end. Of course, to be blunt and a snob, scores of other New Yorkers find it the same.

Today, I—with those New Yorkers and tourists from the four corners of the globe—found my source of vitamin D and sensory delights within the former pig boiling grounds and Native Lands. Perhaps Frederick Law Olmsted’s crown jewel of his parks, the rush of the city, the pace of life, and endless streams of people typically find a kinder, more peaceful balance within the bricked interior. Of course, not all people know how to—oh I don’t know—look both ways and cross the paths properly, but overall it’s pretty hard to remain beaten and angry when making your own breeze as your literally roll past skyscrapers, the ponds, the grassy knolls, and the ball fields that seemingly spring from nowhere. There’s more than the whimsical charm of Audrey Hepburn riding a bicycle in Roman Holiday. Instead, it’s charm, whimsy, and release. You might be in running pants prepared for sweat and a workout, but you’ll see others in flowy dresses on bikes with baskets—more dreamy Paris imagery than Hepburn on days like today with the leaves almost changing and a perfect balance of temperature and sunshine—and the whimsical humor of men on bikes tall enough to reach the sky.

Lovers will pass by.

You’ll forget, for a moment, about the horrors of the past week, month, and year.
That's the Sunday I've long dreamed of, and sometimes made come true. Today, as the last Benlysta infusion has faded (and I'm a week from my next one), I headed out worse for the wear with an extra nerve blocker and an extra pain controller to boot. This weekend has been packed with busy crowds, as the market was crazy packed on Saturday and in Whole Foods the amount of insanity over the last figs and grapes was absurd. The past month or so, I've been making a concerted effort to reclaim things I've loved and needed as centers of my being per se. My bi-weekly trips to the market for fruits and veggies from my favorite coop upstate, my favorite wine (Chateau Renaissance) and chats with Patrice, the owner, and now a local favorite of NY whiskey (Breuckelen Distilling) are more than the reclaiming of fall and changing of seasons. Aside from the fact that the guys at BD and I chatted, and shared our disdain of another whiskey guy at the market who is--well--a jerk, and I had about two shots of whiskey (making me happy)... What? After last week, I'm surprised I wasn't more buzzed than that at the market. Those crowds, though, filled Central Park today too.

In a city of millions, it would be nice if chumps would learn to look at cross lights before trolling across. Just saying. Beyond that, my miles in the park, round and round, hurt like hell, required the use of an inhaler, and I had to push my bike for about two minutes (up a bend) at one point. Yet, as these things go, my mind released and I remembered back to my husband refusing Citibikes, to buy bikes, or anything along the sorts. We rent bikes the first Labor Day we were married, in VA Beach. After that, it was like pulling teeth without novocaine. As I rolled through the skyscrapers and trees still lush with green, and the throngs of people on an early Fall day, I thought of how simple it is that I do these things now. Yes, there are days I would rather have come company, but these days solo is pretty good too. The goods from the market, to the Citibike membership I bought myself, it all balances out.

There still aren't enough hours in the day, and there are never enough days in the week . . . but, little things make it all more manageable.