Years ago I had a man say "Meet me under the Eiffel Tower," in a lovely British accent that still resonates in fond memories. I never did see him again, although I often imagined flying to Heathrow and walking with him down rain-soaked London roads glowing by the light of streetlamps on sidewalks and in glass puddles. I think TV has tainted my perceptions of London, because I've never actually been there. One place I have been to, however, is Pittsburgh, and it isn't any less romantic to me than my London fantasies, despite actually having lived in its filth and rust and crime-ridden neighborhoods. At night it twinkles with a spectrum of bridge lights over black rivers, during the day gothic spires rise high up over the city in old world grandeur. Saturyne said to me from Boston, one day in the fall, "Isn't living out here magical?" A few months later she was digging her car out of the snow in frustrated despair, but I guess a good memory is always a good memory, or more than likely, we just choose to remember the favorable details. It is, unfortunately, these positive instances that make it so difficult to free ourselves from the past, to remember the homework, the tests, the tears after the hockey game, the desperate crafting of a futile letter from a Florida hotel room while everyone else was out on the beach. My life appears to be a repetitive series of separations from people thousands of miles away who for no good reason I can't seem to retain.
Tomorrow, in a breach of break-up etiquette, I'm going to see one of those people, and B said to me last week, "Don't cave in to that." I have no willpower. Is it bad when you have to bend the truth around your friends because you are certain they will disapprove? Today she said to me, "If you think you are going to get something out of this, then I will shut up." I said, "I can't think of anything." That wasn't true either, but the truth is so painful that when I hear it in my own head, I cover my ears and sing "La la la la" as loudly as I can.
Last night when the truth and doubts made my stomach churn, I drove out at 10:30 p.m. in the 40 degree weather to buy a bottle of Mondavi Riesling. As I dug for my ATM card at the checkout counter, the cashier stood for a while scrutinizing my driver license. "You look really different here," she finally concluded, putting the card back down on the small table in front of me. "Yeah," I said. "It's a really old picture." A picture of a more innocent and less jaded 17 year old who smiled, even back then, smugly without showing any teeth. I took the bottle of wine home and put it in the fridge, unopened. I'll take it to Pittsburgh, I thought. Warm, drunk self-pity is always better than the cold, sober kind.
In a stroke of strange luck, my favorite Sharks fan called me at work today and offered me a ticket to tonight's game against the Predators. It's hard to keep crying over yourself when you've just been given a club seat ticket to an NHL game. Shortly after that, Superstar called and told me he was going to the Pens game. Damn the skeptics -- I am elated to see him tomorrow.
Tomorrow, in a breach of break-up etiquette, I'm going to see one of those people, and B said to me last week, "Don't cave in to that." I have no willpower. Is it bad when you have to bend the truth around your friends because you are certain they will disapprove? Today she said to me, "If you think you are going to get something out of this, then I will shut up." I said, "I can't think of anything." That wasn't true either, but the truth is so painful that when I hear it in my own head, I cover my ears and sing "La la la la" as loudly as I can.
Last night when the truth and doubts made my stomach churn, I drove out at 10:30 p.m. in the 40 degree weather to buy a bottle of Mondavi Riesling. As I dug for my ATM card at the checkout counter, the cashier stood for a while scrutinizing my driver license. "You look really different here," she finally concluded, putting the card back down on the small table in front of me. "Yeah," I said. "It's a really old picture." A picture of a more innocent and less jaded 17 year old who smiled, even back then, smugly without showing any teeth. I took the bottle of wine home and put it in the fridge, unopened. I'll take it to Pittsburgh, I thought. Warm, drunk self-pity is always better than the cold, sober kind.
In a stroke of strange luck, my favorite Sharks fan called me at work today and offered me a ticket to tonight's game against the Predators. It's hard to keep crying over yourself when you've just been given a club seat ticket to an NHL game. Shortly after that, Superstar called and told me he was going to the Pens game. Damn the skeptics -- I am elated to see him tomorrow.
She looks around
There are snowflakes on the ground
Here comes another lonely Christmas
Stars in the night
There is one there shining bright
Shine bright for me this lonely Christmas
She phones her mom
Says this time she cannot come
Don't worry I'm with friends this Christmas
Dad gets upset
But in time he soon forgets
Here comes another lonely Christmas
And I wanted to say to you
How much I want to be with you
I wanted to say to you
How much I need to be with you
Christmas time comes once a year
She knows this time he won't be near
- Erasure, She Won't be Home
There are snowflakes on the ground
Here comes another lonely Christmas
Stars in the night
There is one there shining bright
Shine bright for me this lonely Christmas
She phones her mom
Says this time she cannot come
Don't worry I'm with friends this Christmas
Dad gets upset
But in time he soon forgets
Here comes another lonely Christmas
And I wanted to say to you
How much I want to be with you
I wanted to say to you
How much I need to be with you
Christmas time comes once a year
She knows this time he won't be near
- Erasure, She Won't be Home
It reminds me of our spring in Ft. Lauderdale, my eyelashes wet in the damp evening wind that rocked the palms and tangled my hair. Sorrow in the midst of revelry, a sunburned, weary dinner outdoors made foggy by talk of computers and business and future fortunes. Desire is the root of all suffering, said Buddha or someone equally all-knowing, and I desired huge, nebulous things I couldn't verbalize, but which sat studying and unfeeling back in a dark, frosty city a thousand miles north. Two days later from the rusty seat of a carnival ferris wheel, I looked between various faded pink, orange, and green bulbs down at the campus and the Pittsburgh night, my white breath falling and rising in rhythmic rotations.
This desire hangs about me still, hovering like a cloud of gnats that trails when I walk and reforms when I pause to think. And so I find myself constantly running, the cloud following behind in a long, persistent string, waiting until I stop so it can reconvene about my head and continue the torment.
In my "all or nothing" attitude about life, from work to horses to hockey to love and back again, you are not exempt. It is all, or it is nothing to me, and it comes so close to nothing now that I want to scream at the top of my lungs when I am most alone, so that I can hear the despondency that echoes in cold hallways. In the falling snow on a fuzzy television, the weatherman points at some piece of me, buried and dead in an east coast winter I left behind.
This desire hangs about me still, hovering like a cloud of gnats that trails when I walk and reforms when I pause to think. And so I find myself constantly running, the cloud following behind in a long, persistent string, waiting until I stop so it can reconvene about my head and continue the torment.
In my "all or nothing" attitude about life, from work to horses to hockey to love and back again, you are not exempt. It is all, or it is nothing to me, and it comes so close to nothing now that I want to scream at the top of my lungs when I am most alone, so that I can hear the despondency that echoes in cold hallways. In the falling snow on a fuzzy television, the weatherman points at some piece of me, buried and dead in an east coast winter I left behind.
I write this from a seedy hotel room in Redwood City, still clothed half in athletic warm-ups and a pink sweater I've been wearing for two days straight. It's the first peace and quiet I've had since returning to California, and it was worth every penny of my $75 plus tax. Welcome home, they say, welcome home. It takes a tragedy to discover who your true friends are, and I've discovered very few since my return. It's not mere displacement anymore, it's alienation, it's the sense that someone hasn't just been warming your seat while you're away, they've taken it, and they've been hoping you wouldn't come back for it. Now it's just a crude struggle I don't have the energy or inclination for, the type of hair pulling, knock down, drag out fight like the kind that occurs between the last two people in a game of musical chairs. I just want to walk away and give my chair up. I never wanted to come back for it anyway.
The receptionist looked startled tonight as I dragged paper bags and suitcases down the carpeted stairs into the hotel lobby, crashing into glass doors and stumbling over my own heeled shoes. "Will you be ok," she asked with concern. "Your room is on the second floor." If I can survive the estrangement of my family from my life and conscience, I think I can get up one flight of stairs to the second floor. Or maybe I can't. There is that old saying, the straw that broke the camel's back. And when that right turn signal in my dear old Camry started blinking insanely, I pulled out my 1998 owner's manual. The turn signal arrow will flash more rapidly than normal when a front or rear turn signal is out. Well then, I thought, as I shoved the manual back into the glove box. Well then. I cried down the highway, going 80 mph in a blur of horror and anguish.
It's $8 for a small crappy Round Table pizza out here. Gas is $1.71 for 87 octane. I haven't eaten Round Table pizza in years. It's still bad. I miss Mineo's, snow, and Superstar. I bought a quart of milk at the Albertsons, still insanely thirsty after hockey. I am proof now that while unemployed and homeless, hockey goes on. With nowhere to go and my car packed with most of my worldly belongings, I drove to the rink at 4:00 and stared at the whiteboard with the locker room assignments. Someone was pounding on the plexiglass behind me. I turned around and it was the assistant coach for my women's team, on the ice. "I got you in two games tonight, because most of the girls went to the Sharks game," he yelled through the crack between the zamboni doors. I nodded in acknowledgment, then went outside to get my bag. They made me play D in my second game, and I haven't been so confused since high school physics. I had the puck a lot more, but fatigue and the steady stream of tears that fogged up my face shield made it difficult to skate. Violently off sides at one point, I wanted to go home. Remembering I had no home, I stayed and skated it out alongside a group of women who remained supportive despite seeing that I couldn't skate backwards or stay in position.
As a child in middle school, I often dreamed while outside, forced to play softball and other sports I disliked, that a great bird would swoop down from the sky and take me far away from this place I hated. I think at various times in my life, that bird did take me places, but only for such short duration that I was never able to grasp the magnitude of what I was missing, of the places I visited but never lived, of the people I would never meet, of the great loves I would never have. So more recently, I guess this bird decided to give me that chance, to let me develop a life far away and to love and to lose and to be inconsolable, before cruelly returning me to this place that I know now I don't belong. All I can think is, that bird must be an albatross. He's definitely not a blue bird of happiness.
I wish I could stay in this dumpy hotel for a long time. But you know, the internet access is bad. So tomorrow I leave, but only after stuffing my pockets with the free continental breakfast, because that is what homeless people do.
The receptionist looked startled tonight as I dragged paper bags and suitcases down the carpeted stairs into the hotel lobby, crashing into glass doors and stumbling over my own heeled shoes. "Will you be ok," she asked with concern. "Your room is on the second floor." If I can survive the estrangement of my family from my life and conscience, I think I can get up one flight of stairs to the second floor. Or maybe I can't. There is that old saying, the straw that broke the camel's back. And when that right turn signal in my dear old Camry started blinking insanely, I pulled out my 1998 owner's manual. The turn signal arrow will flash more rapidly than normal when a front or rear turn signal is out. Well then, I thought, as I shoved the manual back into the glove box. Well then. I cried down the highway, going 80 mph in a blur of horror and anguish.
It's $8 for a small crappy Round Table pizza out here. Gas is $1.71 for 87 octane. I haven't eaten Round Table pizza in years. It's still bad. I miss Mineo's, snow, and Superstar. I bought a quart of milk at the Albertsons, still insanely thirsty after hockey. I am proof now that while unemployed and homeless, hockey goes on. With nowhere to go and my car packed with most of my worldly belongings, I drove to the rink at 4:00 and stared at the whiteboard with the locker room assignments. Someone was pounding on the plexiglass behind me. I turned around and it was the assistant coach for my women's team, on the ice. "I got you in two games tonight, because most of the girls went to the Sharks game," he yelled through the crack between the zamboni doors. I nodded in acknowledgment, then went outside to get my bag. They made me play D in my second game, and I haven't been so confused since high school physics. I had the puck a lot more, but fatigue and the steady stream of tears that fogged up my face shield made it difficult to skate. Violently off sides at one point, I wanted to go home. Remembering I had no home, I stayed and skated it out alongside a group of women who remained supportive despite seeing that I couldn't skate backwards or stay in position.
As a child in middle school, I often dreamed while outside, forced to play softball and other sports I disliked, that a great bird would swoop down from the sky and take me far away from this place I hated. I think at various times in my life, that bird did take me places, but only for such short duration that I was never able to grasp the magnitude of what I was missing, of the places I visited but never lived, of the people I would never meet, of the great loves I would never have. So more recently, I guess this bird decided to give me that chance, to let me develop a life far away and to love and to lose and to be inconsolable, before cruelly returning me to this place that I know now I don't belong. All I can think is, that bird must be an albatross. He's definitely not a blue bird of happiness.
I wish I could stay in this dumpy hotel for a long time. But you know, the internet access is bad. So tomorrow I leave, but only after stuffing my pockets with the free continental breakfast, because that is what homeless people do.
There's things I remember and things I forget
I miss you, I guess that I should
Three thousand five hundred miles away
But what would you change if you could?
- Counting Crows, Raining in Baltimore
I miss you, I guess that I should
Three thousand five hundred miles away
But what would you change if you could?
- Counting Crows, Raining in Baltimore
