I am in Boston. It is snowing again. Outside I can hear car doors slamming and an ignition starting. Tomorrow the roads will be slick and full of muck, and I’m going to wonder why I am here. But whenever it gets warm I immediately forget the winter. It melts, too. On Monday I went to an ice sculpting competition of groups of local art students. They did not know how to sculpt ice, there was no professional supervision, and after being given 1200 pounds of fresh ice, the final result was a bunch of smaller ice blocks, rearranged in a way that resembles some other cube-ish-object. Okay, so one group managed to make a lobster, and one group made a boat, but I wanted swans and angels and things with faces. Suffice to say, I was disappointed. There was also an unhappy looking ice queen there, though I regret to say I failed to take her picture, who tied the whole thing together with her electric blue, poorly applied eye shadow and cheap wedding dress that was supposed to be some kind of whimsical.
It was funny.
Did I say that it is snowing again? I know I was getting too excited when we had a few fifty-degree days in a row and I thought, YES, this is the end of winter! I know that it is still February, but somehow my mind just can’t believe it. What’s funny in Boston is that they don’t do jack shit about the snow. You’d think, well, this happens all the time for about half the year– maybe we should have a system. There is no system. The system is there’s going to be a foot of snow in the road and it’s every man for himself, boots or no boots.
Speaking of disappointments, I saw he’s just not that into you on Friday. Don’t do it. Don’t give in to the possibilities of girly-movie-therapy. There is none to be found here, and this is not because of the overall mission statement of the movie which is to make its viewers explicitly aware of its title. Everyone rolls their eyes and says duh that movie was bad, but I love girl movies, and I thought this one had some possibilities. All it did was confirm my suspicions that girls have little self-respect or self-esteem, and allow all these things to happen that shouldn’t happen. Where does that come from? Also, Scarlett Johansson needs acting lessons. Lots and lots of acting lessons. The most entertaining part of the movie was a confessional of two black women talking about being dumped. They were irrelevant to the story and still the most uplifting part of the whole trashy thing.
Anyways. Right now, I have less than a hundred days to graduation. I’m excited for this whole thing to be over, but I know I’ll be sad when it is.
On the floor of my room are strewn pebbles of dirt and sand left over from my sister who likes to deposit unwanted things in places that don’t belong to her. There are no less than four boxes of papers that I cannot identify, an old computer keyboard without a computer, a pair of speakers and a garbage bag full of clothes my brother only sometimes wears, so he is often in and out digging through old t-shirts looking for a keeper. When I packed for home I thought, I won’t be there for very long, so I failed to bring anything fun to wear. I wander around in my sister’s old party dress because I am so depressed about being stuck here that it is the only way to pretend to be cheered up.
I have been listening to fleet foxes for days now. It makes me think of running, just running for my life, and it seems to be one of the few things I think of these days. I came home almost two weeks ago to watch my father shuffle around in a blue hospital gown, wheezing and hacking up his insides. There is a tumor on his esophagus that hasn’t hit bottom, and they’re shrinking it with radiation and chemo. I imagine he will glow in the dark soon, the tumor pulsing inside him like a second heart. I am mildly paralyzed in spirit and all I do is wander from day to day, wondering when I get to leave, having nothing really to do with my time but try to be helpful when all anybody ever says to me is just go, that’s fine. And I have all my relatives patting me on the back saying, it’s really good you came home, Sandy, your dad really needs you. Every time it happens I feel like screaming, what did you think I wouldn’t come home for this? Did you think I would really just ignore it?
All of my cousins are studying money or law. Or law in order to have to manage their own finances. My cousin had a baby with her investment broker boyfriend and now she has a 24/7 baby nurse who brings the baby to her bed in the night to nurse. I think there is a dearth of integrity in this world, and it is possibly growing by the second. I don’t know why everyone wants to give up good work, work that makes you feel lighter and more hopeful in the planet just for the sake of some monetary security that only provides a sort of superficial cushion against the things that are actually plaguing us. In a year, I might move to Berkeley with Siv just to see the things she does, just to document the way things actually should be done. It makes me happy that there is at least one person I know who has found what she loves and is pursuing it to the nth degree.
I am upset because I was just beginning to feel like this was a time in my life that I could be sure about, I thought I could stop thinking that at any moment a piano was going to fall from the sky and land squarely on top of me. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Unfortunately that time I tried to convince myself away from cancer was silly, was something I won’t be able to do again.
Also, Justin has disowned me as a friend. This is about trust, he said. I have never kept anything from you. Which is a lie, mind you, and I didn’t keep anything from him that was ever really worth knowing. We will be friends for life! I said ardently as he poured his soul out to me, drunk, the day after his birthday. Stay here, he said. I couldn’t, it was wrong from the beginning and will never be right, and I sailed away to someone else’s house and now I can never look back.
How do we always end up on the path of least resistance? I’m on my way out of it, though it always takes me longer than it takes a normal person. Karlo tells me that I don’t react normally in any situation. If it sounds like a bad idea, or if it sounds somewhat dangerous, I run towards it at full speed with open arms. And then when it all turns sour, I have to think about it for a long time before I begin to turn away.
I babysat on Saturday night. Between the expected college sojourn into the nearest party scene and the following night of relationship doom, I sat for the three year old and the nine month old next door. Coco, the tiny monkey-like three year old was good. She asked me to draw with her and as we did, Caleb was quietly playing with a wooden board full of locks and latches that looked ready to pinch his tiny fingers. I moved closer to him, to watch; one moment he was happily playing, and in the next, he peered up at me with wide, expectant eyes, trembling. The shocking realization that I was not his mother began to sink in. His mouth pulled downward. He took a deep breath and bellowed, terrified at my unfamiliar face. Then he began to shuffle away from me, as best as his nine month old body could, on all fours, sometimes slipping into a belly crawl, that took him on the slowest path towards the nearest hiding place, which was the bathroom. I felt as though I were babysitting an extremely vocal turtle without a shell. Unwilling to dominate him with the five feet and twenty years I have on him, I let him crawl away and followed him slowly, as one would shadow a hysterical drunk girl– that is, with extreme caution. My main goal was to make sure he would not hurt himself , so I let him think he was escaping my horrifying presence until he tried to wedge himself behind the toilet. I scooped him up, and he wriggled backwards as though I were some kind of monster, screaming.
“I’m sorry!” I kept saying to him. I put him back down in the hallway, trying to reason with his little brain. “I know I’m not your mom.” He looked up at me for a moment, blinked, and began screaming again, crawling all over the brownstone apartment, as if he were sure his mother was there somewhere. He went to the bedroom, and I put him in her bed, which only led to more disillusion as he scoured the covers looking for her while I ran around the bed making sure he didn’t fall off. Upset that she still had not appeared, he settled down in the center and wailed. During a lull, I began singing to him. The only song I could think to sing was “you turn me on I’m a radio” by Joni Mitchell, and while I was singing, he would not cry. I think he was mostly just mesmerized by sound, and paralyzed by exhaustion, and fixated on the tiny doll I was making dance in front of him. After about a half hour of this, I laid down on the bed next to him, his tiny hiccuping, innocent body, and my exhausted, guilty grown up body both worn down by looking for something that wasn’t there. He stared at me. The irrational part of my brain told me to feel guilty. I know you know what I did last night, I said. This is my serving of instant karma. But he had finally cried himself to sleep, and I tip-toed away contented that I had successfully kept him from hurting himself in any way. The difference between us, besides the fact that he is an infant and I am a full-grown human being, is that he will wake up and his mother will be there, and that is all he had wanted.
On Thursday night, Raphael and I rode to meet my sister in her posh Cambridge-side hotel near the galleria. The doormen said they would watch our bikes and we sat in the lobby that was outfitted with pillows, it seemed, on every possible surface. The colors were pale yellow and deep reds, and golds and dark wood. It looked like some kind of south african hunting lodge for royalty and I leaned back on the couch, “Someone should bring us drinks,” I said, kicking my feet up and smiling. The goal of my comment was to convey that this looked like the kind of place where a servant would pop out of the floor to wipe the sweat off your face, and nothing more. But he shook his head at me, as if to gently shame me the way my mother would when I was small and didn’t know better, “You always want more,” he said, and I grew quiet, throwing myself against the many pillows behind me. In order to erase the comment, among the many comments he made that I had no response to, I leapt up to try out every other chair in the room, and he followed me. When my sister finally came down, I threw my arms around her. We had dinner and he talked to her like a normal person. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t ending. I can do this, I kept saying, he likes me so much. I like him. It’s so simple.
Maybe I should have taken that as a warning: nothing I do is ever simple. So when the following night unraveled in a marathon of bad decisions, I should not have been surprised. When I began convincing myself to ignore little things that bothered me, I should have known. The second you start trying to forget pieces of a relationship is the second things are going wrong. I never said I was sorry, the reason I would be sorry is that I had known I would hurt him from the beginning. I didn’t want that to happen. It is still a long way down from here. I still have July and August to reinvent the wheel and I swear to god I’m working on it.
I never thought about mounting a bike properly. It was just something that I did: throw your legs over and kick off the ground, but apparently that is wrong. Apparently that is the reason my bottom is so sore that every time I sit down I wince a little. You are supposed to push the pedal until it is at about a 45 degree angle from the ground, away from you. You are never supposed to stand while your butt is in the saddle. With your other foot, you step forward and this allows you to stand on the first pedal, and to just go. Raphael taught me this impatiently yesterday, until I asked him if teaching me how to ride a bike was no fun, and then his criticisms became less grating. We spent Saturday night riding all over Boston. We rode through Cambridge and back, through the windy streets of the financial district, to the harbor where I pressed my face against the glass of the seal tank, trying to decipher the name of the only seal that was awake. People were just getting out of the clubs as we rode by, reeking of beer and perfume, overly cologned men cat calling: can I get a ride with you? sexy!
As we were riding Raphael’s backpack made funny faces at me and all I could think was Are we birds or are we fish? Once we were walking and he watched a cyclist waiting in the middle of the road for his friend, she caught up with him and then they began riding together and he said when people ride they either ride like birds or like fish, and those two were definitely birds. They did look very much like two birds meeting on a telephone wire before riding off into the sunset, but I ride behind him in a line as best I can, careful not to catch up or cause any kind of permanent damage in either of us. The first night we rode he skidded out, in a pile of sand on Com ave and scraped his arm up pretty terribly. I screamed and skidded to a halt behind him, putting my foot down and letting the bike fall into my ankles before running up to him. He was more embarrassed than anything, a car stopped to see if we were fine, and he couldn’t answer, so I waved them away. I think if I had gone first I would have fallen too, a point I made later but he didn’t believe me. Asking him about it only made it worse, and when I had lunch with Matt and Kailee the next day Matt told me to pretend it never happened. It would be different if he had been doing something cool, he said, but in this case, it’s probably best to ignore it.
My first bike ride was on the esplanade. Well technically, we rode down bay state first and up the ramp on which I screamed and fell over a few times before making it up the hill . We rode past rats and dumpsters, and every time Raphael looked back to check on me I’m sure I was grinning stupidly at how happy I was, at how much it felt like flying. He tried to teach me the physics of the gears, and told me repeatedly that if I squeezed too hard on the front brake alone I would flip over. Flip OVER it felt like he said it at least thirty times. He would call directions back to me as we were riding: cars are usually exactly where you just where, you have to be careful! Don’t pass a thru-street unless you’re sure of what’s coming, check the cross walks for cars, you shouldn’t be concerned with what’s behind you. Last night, our second ride, a trip on which I made him stop at cvs with me so I could buy a box of tampons, he shook his head at me as I stood in the saddle with my tip-toes on the ground. What! And then I dismounted, making it all the more difficult when the light turned green to go. I’m working on it I called out to him, but I wasn’t sure he heard.
He stood outside the cvs as I made my covert purchases. Every time I buy tampons I end up waiting in line for ten minutes while some dude argues about a coupon. This night was no different. I went back outside and we didn’t talk about the things I bought, and tried to come up with a way to not be so hot. We stood on the sidewalk at coolidge, and I talked about my weak-sauce legs and he looked at the cars in the streetlights, sweating. We could go see a movie, I offered. I would pay ten dollars to sit unbothered in central air conditioning for two hours on a night like this, so we stocked up on a ridiculous amount of water and then we were off, he carried my u-lock like a gentleman. What kind of feminist are you, he asked, and I said a weak-sauce feminist. You don’t have to be any kind of feminist really, you don’t have to be a feminist at all. To which I said, i am a feminist. Aren’t you? I both am and am not a feminist. He said. These are the kinds of things about him that both bother and intrigue me. Why can’t you just say you’re a feminist? Why doesn’t everybody just admit it? He told me about how he refused to support Take Back the Night because domestic and dating violence shouldn’t have to be explicitly labeled as bad. He thinks these are just things that are unquestionably wrong, so why do we have to give them any kind of attention at all? This is my definition of twisted logic, of dangerous reasoning: the utter rationalization of apathy. But apathy implies a kind of lack or absence of emotion, whereas I get the feeling from him that this is about a steadfast refusal to feel, a feeling and then a turning away, as if to say I will not care right now. I think this might be worse.
Outside the grocery store, we locked our bikes together over one bar and I declared they are friends. They are not people, he said. I addressed my bike as a lady and he said bikes do not have genders, to which I said I am gendering my bike. He shook his head at me. Our bikes curled around each other like swans and we walked into the grocery store, I was pink and sweating and smiling like an idiot. We put the gallon of water bottles into his gargantuan bag and I snapped it shut for him. During the movie, we were two of eight people in the theater. We locked our arms and legs together, and it was comfortable. It was equally about warmth as it was about connection; I have trouble separating the two in the first place. He kissed my forehead from time to time and I asked questions because I wasn’t listening. It’s simple to like someone. At least, i think that’s how it should be.
As we rode home, my bag kept slipping around to my belly-side, knocking into my knees as I was riding. There were several moments where I was sure I was going to tip over as I carefully removed my hand from the handlebar to fix it. In kenmore square, a taxi honked and swerved behind me, triggering an involuntary Fuck you! to quickly escape my mouth, this made me laugh, there weren’t even many cars in the street, I was more angered that he was honking at me than anything else. We stopped in front of my house, and to me it felt like birds that were landing, so I decided at that moment that we must be birds. Or he is a bird, and I am the fish that is haphazardly half swimming, half jumping behind him, sprouting baby wings.
Justin left for home two days ago. He left me with the book he just finished reading, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, and a data cd bursting with hip indie artists for me to get to know. Among these artists are Bon Iver and Cat Power, and Broken Social Scene founder Kevin Drew’s album, Spirit If…, which I had yet to purchase, despite the fact that it’s been out for at least half a year.
I am not exactly one for writing music reviews. I don’t really know anything about music, I just know what I like and I like what I think is good. The first song of the album had me all wrapped up in anxiety as the first two and a half minutes is largely of static nothingness with a single melodic loop circling throughout the background. It was terrifying. I don’t know what I was so worried about, because Kevin Drew comes back in ferocious force a minute and a half later, chock-full of that Broken Social Scene sound I remembered. It’s thoughtful and complex, the kind of music I like to study to. I don’t think this is me, clamoring for the comforting semi-electronic, semi-acoustic echo of BSS’ original EP, I just wanted this to be good. I was concerned because in the beginning it sounded like a drugged-out high schooler’s version of the Pixies, and Kevin Drew should aspire to greatness, not sonic mediocrity like so many others who bravely strike out on their own. Perhaps this is what makes the album so good: at least one band member is incorporated throughout almost every song. So he is not, necessarily, striking out on his own. This isn’t really a fuck-you-I-can-do-this-myself kind of album; it’s focused, and pristine, and not a monument to his own ego. I think that fact makes itself apparent, and I also think it contributes to the album’s overall contemplative, acoustic, electric, and whole-heartedly felt sound. Drew doesn’t disregard anything.
In other news, Back Bay Review is finally in its post-production stages. I hope. I am crossing my fingers and closing my eyes, hoping that this is true. Our editor seems to have disappeared into the real world that comes after graduation so it was left to me to oversee these last few weeks of re-formatting, re-editing, and re-driving-ourselves-crazy. Ideally the world will be a more organized place next year, I would like to develop a system for everything. I’m unsure of how to do this. I am not one for accounting or managerial skills, but I have faith that it is something I can learn. Lizzie and I discussed how this is the summer of breaking out of our life-long wrought shells: for me this involves writing publicly and introducing myself to strangers. For her it involves speaking Spanish out loud to people she does not know. These are basic life-skills that I somehow managed to evade during the years of my development and this is something I regret a little. In the BBR office I rarely speak unless it is to voice a concern about the publication, which I almost always begin with an unsteady, high-pitched “Ummm.” Luckily Zak has learned to read this noise as it is indicative of an oncoming substantive statement. Maybe I have trust issues.
Today, after editing for hours, I sat in the kitchen of our house while Melissa made delicious “Asian-inspired” soup and we talked about our similar roommate experiences, both of which culminated in quiet deteriorations due to an abundance of miscommunication. It was comforting knowing someone else had gone through the same thing, and to know that we could both come out of it whole and normal. Sometimes when you get in pits like that it feels like you’ll never set anything right again. I think this summer is going to be fine. By fine I mean good. I mean sweet and heartening and full of good things like asian-inspired soups and fig bars.
