Foxymoron

9,854 Days

It has always seemed to me that the day before your birthday is just as significant as your birthday itself. After all, it is the last day that you will ever be 2 or 5 or 16 or 18 or 21 or 27.

Today is the last day of my 27th year -- a year full of change and stagnation, hurt and joy, rejection and acceptance, sadness and love. God. So much love.

It has been the most significant year of my life and, if you know anything about me, you know that I mark all of matters of significance with a list.

27 Things That Made My 27th Year

27. I FINALLY figured out how to get to Target, work, the grocery store, the mall, the bookstore, and the bank without thinking and without my GPS. If you've never been to New England, you do not understand the significance of this accomplishment.

26. Five people flew across the country and one flew across an ocean to visit me this year. That's six whole people who love me enough to cough up cash, pack their bags and brave an airport to spend time with me. Six?! That's like .... a basketball team with one sub. Shit.

25. I went to Vermont for three weeks to do nothing but write, talk about writing, think about writing, make writer friends, stalk famous writers and drink whiskey read.

24. I drove a car in New York City. I did not kill anyone. I did not myself die.

23. I made a huge turkey with my best friend in the entire world.

22. I saw a sweet baby boy take his very first steps. And I cried.

21. I signed with an agent.

20. I made a major breakthrough on a story I've been tinkering with for two and a half years.

19. My parents announced that they are getting to build their dream cabin on their land in the mountains (something they have wanted to do for years).

18. I got to spend Christmas with my sweet nieces.

17. My grandmother came to visit for a week and told me the story of how she met my grandfather. (He came into the store where she worked and asked to see a knife, then said, "I'll buy this if you'll come to the show with me tonight.").

16. Then she complimented me on how clean I keep my house.

15. I watched Hocus Pocus at Halloween on an outdoor projector in Salem, MA.

14. I walked on the beach in Maine with my sweet friend.

13. I bought a leopard print dress on sale for $8.

12. I learned that, when you get a new coat, you're supposed to cut those threads that hold the back seams together making it appear that you have stuffed two hams between the fabric and your ass. After I'd been wearing it for three months.

11. I visited Canada for the first time and ate fries with gravy.

10. I did a reading and Jim Shepard and Kevin McIlvoy heard it.

9. I met the writer of a book I love, love, loved and didn't realize it was her until after I already liked her. (Hi, Heidi!)

8. My sister told me she was proud of me.

7. My mom bought me a new down comforter (and it's purple).

6. My dad continued being awesome.

5. My ex-boyfriend returned and appears to be significantly less asshole-ish than he was before. To be continued...? Maybe? Either way, it seems I've learned to let go of a grudge.

4. My landlady told me she hopes her daughter will grow up to be as sweet as I am.

3. My girl scout troop chose to use our Christmas party fund to sponsor three needy children through the Christmas Angel Network. Instead of their other options of going to a pottery-painting place or a play or having a party with a pinata.

2. Five of my sweet girlfriends are having new babies! :)

1. I quit drinking Diet Coke. 

Wherein I Abandon Truth and Present You with the Opening of My New Novel

From Famine, a novel   

    Hazel and I are in the bathtub and the realization comes to roost: her mother will not have another child and so I will not have another child.
    Maybe I am being punished. Maybe we are being saved.
    Either way, Hazel, she is all we get. I love her. I do. I had to talk it up to myself at first, but it comes easy now and, with it, fear. She could get lost or hurt. I could lose her or hurt her.
    Sometimes, this time, as she picks a soggy ball of leftover toilet paper off herself, hands it to me and shrieks, “Dear Lord, Daddy, what is this craziness on my hooha,” I am grateful for the chance to stay at home with her. It is just us and I laugh. Long and hard, harder than I have ever laughed at anyone.
    But there are other times, when I think how I could crush those tiny bones if I were mad enough. I could collapse my little girl like a lawn chair.
    Other times, she draws rainbows on the backs of receipts from Camille’s purse while we wait for our meals to arrive. She asks over and over how to spell Daddy, so as to make it clear they are for me. She cries when I ball them up and throw them out in front of her.
    There is no reason to be such an asshole. I know this. I do. It is, as my mother would tell us when we swore or hit each other or ate our school lunches from the fridge in the middle of the night, completely unnecessary.    
    I have a Hello Kitty washrag over my penis, which is silly because Hazel’s seen it plenty before. Camille is European. French. She has always been very relaxed about nudity.
    Hazel wants to know if she can wash my hair. I say that she can. She stands up and walks behind me, using the space between the tub and my body.
    “Would you like Strawberry shampoo? Or the fishie kind?”
    “Surprise me,” I say.
    They say French women do not get fat, that they know how to eat for pleasure and stop when they are full.
    This is a lie.
    Camille is fat.
    She is so fat that her knees rub together and her periods have stopped. She is so fat that she won’t eat in restaurants that have chairs with arms. She is so fat that she can’t take a bath with Hazel because the tub would overflow.
    She is too fat to have another baby.
    I don’t know how much she weighs; I don’t want to.
    Hazel says that she is making me a mohawk. I am imagining Camille as a little girl, a rounded baby Buddha belly in place of that stretch-marked overhang around her middle.
    She was fat when I met her. Just a little bit fat, juicy. My father made a comment about it once, said that when I was done with this one, maybe I should try a skinny girlfriend.
    I tried to breakup with her after that, but I loved her.  I still love her.
    The bigger she gets, the further away from me she seems.
    Her fat, it’s a tumor.
    It distorts her, us. We are growing into something mutinous, grotesque. We are becoming something so ugly it is beautiful.
    I lie awake at night next to her heavy breathing, one foot sticking out from under the covers and I poke at the blubber. I wonder how to go about removing it. So many ways to skin a cat, I think.
    When we have sex, which we still do regularly enough, I grab her belly like a steering wheel. I pinch parts of her as if they are not really attached and, when she yelps in surprise—in pain--then softly whispers you are hurting me, I ignore it.  I kneed her back fat and hold her thighs too tightly. I play it off as passion, but it is disgust.  It is a desperate desire to rip these pieces off of her and discard them.
    Yet I have to remind myself to let go.
    I want to starve her or carve into her with a knife. I do not, however, want to leave her. I won’t.
    But you could find someone else, my mother says, someone you’re more compatible with. It is clear what her emphasis means. My mother and father have never liked Camille. She and I were everything they were not, for better and for worse. They accused her of getting pregnant to trap me.     You don’t owe her a thing, they said.
    But I felt I owed her this, the house and Hazel, whose irises were, at the time of her naming, blue.

Day Oh, Shit, I Totally Forgot About That Challenge: Someone Who Makes My Life Worth Living

I'm going to cheat and pick two people. My nieces. I have never loved anyone the way I love these girls. I'd jump in front of a bus for them. I'd let them feed me their boogers if they thought it was funny and they needed a laugh.

M looks like she fell out of Gap Kids. Perfect little blunt-cut bangs and the prettiest smile you ever did see. Iz is my little pigpen. She's got these messy curls. But she looks and you and if you don't turn into a puddle, you just don't have a heart.

They are hilarious, too. M says, "I'm parched" when she needs a drink of water. And she's only 7, folks! 7! She loves fashion and drawing and puppies OMFG! puppies!

Iz believes everything I tell her and the last time I spoke to her on the phone she said, "Oh, Auntie, I don't like you. I LOVE you." Four-year-olds rock! She can put together a puzzle in 8 seconds and she's a camera hog and wildebeest and the most social creature ever. My mom told me that one time they were babysitting her and there was thunder and lightning and it was dark and Iz was scared. So my mom said, "let's pretend we're at the movies and we get to sit by our best friend." And Iz plopped down next to her, patted her knee and said, "Oh, okay! You be Auntie Kara!" LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

These girls. Sigh. I don't know how I could love anyone anymore. People say I will love my own more. Man. I think that might just mash me.

Oh, my punkies. Miss. Miss. Miss. 

#tweetyour16yearoldself

It is 1998 and the Y2K thing that you are so afraid of will be a bust. Nothing will happen. Except that your mother will fill up the bathtub because she forgot to buy bottled water and you will laugh at her. Cherish this moment for it is so quintessentially your mother.

You and Erin will be best friends all of your lives, but you are going to make other friends, friends you have more in common with and like better. But don't let her go and try not to worry so much about her. She will turn out okay. She won't get pregnant and you'll both go to college.

Pay more attention to your dad's lectures about money. He knows what he's talking about.

Wear something sleeveless, something low-cut, something besides those damned baggy tee shirts. Your body looks the best it ever will.

When you go to your summer program at Stanford, don't have a crush on the boy everyone has a crush on. He is too skinny and full of himself and, years later, he'll get in trouble with the law - arrested in an airport for wrapping pot in tinfoil, to be exact. He is bad news.

You are not too fat. You are not too tall. You have the prettiest head of hair anyone has ever seen. Believe people when they tell you this, soak up compliments the way you do those terrible digs.

Someday, a long time from now, you are going to be on the other side of the "he always likes my friend" charade. Soak in how terrible it feels to be on the outside of that now. And remember it when your friend's boyfriend hits on you. Don't go home with him. Just don't. Remember how bad it feels. How much it hurts. Don't wallow in it now, but keep it close by. You'll need it.

You're going to get to go to college. Basically for free. But when you get there, you are going to miss home. Your dad's Sunday breakfasts, watching Dawson's Creek and eating dinner on T.V. trays with your mother. Your parents are going to sell the house you live in now, so go through all the rooms and preserve a good mental picture. Lie down on the floors and smell the carpets and run your fingers along the light switches. This is the place you grew up. This is where you became you. Lie down on your back in the grass and look up at the sky and the mountains and take all of that in. Because you will begin to forget it otherwise.

 

Day 4: Something you have to forgive someone for

Oh, Jesus. LOADED. This prompt is LOADED.

My grandmother. From the time I was a child, she has harped on me about weight and food and weight, weight, weight, weight. Food.

Nary a visit went by when she didn't poke my side or my chin or hold up a pair of my jeans from the laundry and cluck, "going to have to start watching our weight now, aren't we babydoll?"

She said things like, "well, you're inclined to look a little heavy, but you shouldn't eat so much bread." She'd cut my breakfast toast in half and throw the rest into the garbage. Once, she took me and my best friend to the circus. She bought us each a bag of peanuts. I, of course, dropped mine. When I asked for another, she said no. When I pointed out that my friend had one, she laughed, she said, "oh, she needs them more than you," and poked my belly. We were five. Five years old.

Despite all of this, I love my grandmother. She is a good woman. She is a strong woman. 

But it hurts. The things she says. The way, to her, I am nothing but a body. If she made even one-tenth the production out of my accomplishments as she does the size of my ass, I might be a different person. I might feel differently about myself, about others, about the world at large (no pun intended).

But she is who she is. She means well. I believe that.

I just have to forgive her. Because the weight of hating her is too much. 

Day 3: Something I Need Forgive Myself For

It was college. It was April. I met a blue-eyed boy and he had a dead brother.

I had just broken up with someone I thought I'd be with forever (someone I got back together with later, someone I am not with now. We are wrong about shit sometimes, no?).

Anyway, he picked up the pieces, this blue-eyed boy with the dead brother. He picked me up at bars in the middle of the night. He brought me ice cream when days were bad. He played with my hair and bought me a space heater and, on more than one occasion, loaned me money for a credit card bill.

He listened to every sordid detail of my life. He picked up his phone whenever I called. He never asked me for anything in return.

And as for me? I took it all. Everything he offered. I took greedily and hungrily and in a way only someone who is very damaged can take.

I broke it off with him in the middle of the night. I asked him never to call me again. I never gave him a reason. I never, in continuing with the theme of our relationship, gave him anything.

I still have that space heater and, every year when I unpack it, I think of him. I wonder what happened to his brother, how he died. Was it slow? Was it tragic? I imagine the two of them as children, chubby and freckled and alive, climbing trees and tearing the tails off lizards. 

I feel sick to my stomach. I wish I had asked. God, why didn't I ask?

 

Day 2: Something I Like About Myself

I like my wit, my hair, the size of my lips, and my ability to nurture others.

Of course every single one of these things has gotten me into my fair share of trouble. But that's another story for another time.

Day 1: Something I Hate About Myself

Aw. Hell.

Well. 

The first 8 or 9 are body parts. 

Personality-wise, which is, of course, infinitely more interesting ....

Let's see. I hate how personally I take things, even completely so totally not even remotely personal things like, oh, I don't know, red lights.

Because I do this I also tend to hold a grudge like nobody's business. Seriously. I remember anniversaries of times people have pissed me off.

I wish I were a more forgiving person. I would say that I'm very accepting (because I am fiercely loyal), meaning that I rarely cut a person out of my life for a wrongdoing and I tend not to judge people just for being who they are, but I definitely hold onto hurts. 

I think this stems from insecurity and fear of abandonment. If I keep a running tally of my loved ones' fuck-ups, after all, I'll have a nice soft pile of paper to cushion the blow if they ever leave me.

Well, that was sufficiently depressing, no?

Thirty Days of Truth

I need to get back into blogging. It makes me feel sane less like my head is a cellphone and someone else is butt dialing a bunch of random numbers.

My awesome blog and IRL friend, Stephanie over at Unvaulted, is doing a challenge-y type thing called 30 Days of Truth. 

I am a copycat follower of brilliance. So. I'm going to do it, too. 

God Says No

by James Hannaham. Do yourself a favor. Buy it. 

It is wonderful and terrifying and funny and sad and I almost didn't even notice how numb my ass was getting while he read from it this afternoon.