the beauty in the stuck

i've been thinking good and hard lately about blogging.

about the start of this blog.

of when it began and why it began and all of the ands in between.

of how young i was and how sad i was. of what it meant to be honest before i realized that words could be categorized as such: honest. of what it was before any one read it, before any ex-boyfriend or future boyfriend or in-between-boyfriend could google my name and find all. of. it.

and if i reach really hard and really far into the cloudy and muggy memory of twenty-three, well...i think my thought then--or my impulse, rather--was to remember. to record. because i was so sure of change. because i knew things would change. and i'd want some sort of record of what had come before. and if i could see how i got from there to here, well then, it'd serve as a blueprint of sorts. for the future.

and at twenty-three it felt like the future was rushing towards me. a great-wave of everything to come. an ocean on the other side of a door.

the blog itself--the whole point of it--hinged upon the notion of change. that life would change. and i would change. and i within this life would thrive. eventually. even if it took time. even if it took failure upon failure upon absolute-fuck-up to get there.

and somewhere along the way, somewhere in the space of the last few years it started to feel as though nothing would change. ever.

and a feeling is a dangerously true thing. even when it's not.

and yes, yes, i know the one constant is change and i understand this on that intellectual level where information is processed.

but it feels like i'll be this age, at this job, riding the same train to the same station, forever. walking through a turnstile towards a position for which i am overeducated and overqualified and absolutely unable to leave because it pays. the. bills.

it was okay to be twenty-three and single and failing but fighting the good fight. it was okay to be twenty-three and writing about how most days i felt more like a disaster than anything else. and it was okay to be twenty-four and twenty-five and still all those things.

somehow though, it doesn't feel okay to be twenty-seven and in this place--stuck in this metaphorical rut. or, well, actual rut.

and so there's a little embarrassment. shame, even.

and it gets harder to write.

but then i think about writing and i think about the length of a story. and about how this one's just a little bit longer than others. and i wrap myself up in that notion and keep going. because you have to. you simply have to keep going.

you know, i still think about the A train. often, i do. about how much i hated it. about how dirty it was: the dim lighting, the putrid color of the seats. and i think about how all those years on the A train, made for my experience on the F. i love the F train. absolutely adore it. i forgive it for much and often. for when it gets stuck at York street, or Jay St-Metrotech. for how it sometimes inches between Bergen and Carroll.

it is not lost on me that i love the F so much precisely because i so deeply loathed the A.

when life begins to chug it will mean more for this period in which it seemed so very stuck.

change. good change. forward movement.

and when i finally meet the man i choose to spend my life with it will mean more for each and every suitcase i trudged home for christmas, alone. it will mean more for these ambiguous years in which i learned to do everything myself: installing the air conditioning and paying the bills and moving into a fourth-floor walk up without a man in sight. it will mean more for that one night when at two in the morning i had to crush the maggots beneath my bed, one by one.  more for the time when half-asleep i rose from bed to tether the roof's door to the stairwell with little more than yellow twine because the wind was banging into it in such a way i was sure the sky was falling.

it will all mean more for these years in which i got so good at maneuvering by myself that i began to wonder if i wasn't too far gone to make room for someone else.

change. it will come. like a thief in the night. taking and bringing both good and bad.

and i do want to remember. so i'm going to try a little bit harder to be that person who believes in the beauty of all that's yet to unfold. that person who sees the beauty in this time now. the beauty in the stuck and the shame and the trudge.

...

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk everything. | Erica Jong

the fight

I don't have the luxury to think about you.

Not until the day you show up to fight for me--a day that I'm altogether, completely unsure will ever arrive--not until that day do I have the luxury to even think about you.

But should you choose to--to show up and to fight--then, then I will fight for you. With everything I have, I will fight. I will fight with a ferocity unmatched by any woman you've before known. I will fight with a ferocity that will absolutely unmoor you. Such is my strength and my will and my grit. Such is my ability to heft and to heave and to drag the heavens toward the earth. That is how I will love you. Should you ever gather the courage to ask.

But until then, until your question and until that-day-that-will-very-likely-never-come, I will go out into the world and search for someone else. And my lips will forget your name.

photo by sam shorey

Getting into the Christmas Spirit

forgive how quiet i've been round these parts. just busy getting into the holiday spirit.

THE BOLD YEAR// offswitch magazine, volume two

I went to my first concert just over a year ago.

I had gotten tickets for my brother for Christmas and the plan was that I'd take the bus to Boston to visit and we'd go together.

I remember that Saturday night: our late dinner ordered in, the cold air blanketing the city, the feeling that i had not a single thing to wear--what does one wear to concerts? I finally settled on a black shift dress and my Frye motorbike boots. We entered the small venue--standing room only--and found a spot close to the stage. Connor got us drinks and then we waited, remarking mostly on how lucky we were to be tall (tall is good where no seats are concerned) and how we were not the usual hipster crowd (in a sea of beanies our heads went hatless).

We were there to see The Head and the Heart. 

Now, I can just imagine readers all over, nodding their heads, of course, of course, The Head and the Heart. But just over a year ago they were virtually unknown. Just over a year ago they were the opening band for someone else. And when we saw them, just over a year ago, no one knew the words to sing along--no one had heard of them. But their music was heaven. And so Connor and I stood there, drinks in hand, bobbing and swaying, as the music moved through and up, as the air was charged with the sound and the guttural need of those voices.

And that was it. I was sold. Hook line and sinker, or however the expression goes.

When I returned to New York I began buying up cheap tickets for fringe (I use that word very loosely) bands playing smaller venues. I saw Noah & the Whale at The Bowery Ballroom. Beirut at The Wellmont. The Lumineers at The Mercury Lounge. Slowly and surely over the course of the year I refined my taste in music and began to chart the city as i did so--venturing into downtown neighborhoods and once foreign boroughs--mapping city and self, unfurling New York and my place in it.

At some point it became very clear: I was made bold by a year of listening to live music.

But how or why i was made bold by this was still unknown--well, maybe not unknown, but certainly beyond words.

It was just about a week ago I went out with some girlfriends I hadn't seen in quite a while and I was explaining all of this and what bands I loved and why and what about their music made my weary heart thrum when my friend Vivienne took a deep breath and said, All of the music in my library was given to me by friends and ex-boyfriends--mostly ex-boyfriends.  

Ah, ex-boyfriends. I've come to realize that in every relationship I've ever had--first loves, half-loves, reluctant flirtations--music plays a part. The passing of the mix-tape might as well be a relationship marker. Music and men. To this day I can't listen to Nick Drake without feeling a sadness and longing for one Sunday in December in which I both lost and found the very best parts of myself on the couch of my first love. 

I'll never forget sitting on the floor of my first boyfriend's apartment. I was just out of high-school, new to New York and terrified by nearly everything. I sat on his floor surrounded by record sleeves and pictures of him and I was quite sure that I wasn't actually keen on him, but I had yet to really wake to that though. He picked up an Ella Fitzgerald album: Ella, she's the one, you know? She's my one. She's my music. She sings and it stirs something low in me. Something i hardly know how to place. 

Who's your ella? he looked right at me and asked. 

Who is your ella? 

Who is my ella?

I hardly knew what he was talking about. I don't know. I don't think i have an ella.

Oh man, i can't wait for the day you find yours. Finding it is the best part. 

Sometimes I wonder how often that question hung over me. How often I was aware of the presence and immediate need of that question.

It took six years, but I now know.

I figured it out this last year in dark and crowded concert halls amongst nearly perfect strangers.

I found my Ella in the sounds of the folk movement coming out of London and the Pacific Northwest. I found my Ella in the broken voices of Charlie Fink and Kristian Matsson. i found my Ella in the sublime dissonance--that perfect space between the Avett Brothers' voices.  In the ferocity and haunting vulnerability with which Laura Marling sings and Johnny Flynn plays the fiddle. I found my Ella in the lyrics which call upon Bukowski and Shakespeare and Hemingway for their piercing (and humblingly simple) wisdom.

I found my Ella. And in finding my Ella, I found myself.

And I did it all without a man.

My music library is made up of those songs that I love. Those songs that stir that low unknowable, unnamable part of myself. The songs that upon listening to I can't help but move and laugh and sway my hips, putting socks to wood floor. Those songs that grant, when I least expect it, a perfect, quiet moment, in which I stand just as still as I  can and cry--because someone else has given voice and melody to my great triumphs and deep tragedies--because someone else has unwrapped what I thought singular and secret.

And in those moments I am not alone. I am never lonely. I stand listening to the chant of the human experience. 

It's that knowing I'm not alone bit--that knowing that others have gone before and others will follow after--that vulnerability that makes for this human experience. That's what made me bold.

Well, that and the music.