i need your help. i'm working on the summer issue of the violet and i need to know your favorite beauty products! what do you most like? what drugstore purchases can't you live with out? where are you willing to spend a little more money--concealer, foundation, the perfect blush shade?
since i've declared this the summer of red lips and my beloved clinique party red is at the nub (and they no longer make it {blerg}) i allowed the woman at sephora to talk me into the pretty expensive YSL rouge pur couture. it's very red (read: of the orange family) but she told me it would work with the yellow in my skin and then went for my achilles' heel by saying it's all the rage in europe! ah, the coup...anything to make me more european. time will tell if it was worth the extra bucks.
bring on those answers!!
on a bench in a park.
in finding love
there was a stolen hour when i was in boston a week ago. an hour in which i found myself on a bench in boston commons sitting next to one of my oldest friends. we sat, the two of us, dark, green wood beneath us, looking out over children and their families, young couples, and the ever present waddle of the ducks.
i was fourteen when i fell half-in-love with sam. he was seventeen and, heaven help me, did he seem old and wise. i was out of my depth around him. knee-deep in wonder and hormones and absolute amazement.
we have lived countless lives since that summer so many years ago. the two of us. we've each lived countless lives in opposite directions.
but just over a week ago, on a bench in a park, in a place called boston we sat and spoke. of all that we know and don't know. all that we've learned and are just now waking to.
mostly of love. of how terribly hard it is. and how terribly painful it is. and why, oh why do people the world over subject themselves to it's brutal whims and terrifying fancies again. and again. and again?
because it's deliriously good. that's what we decided. because of just how delicious it can be--if only for a short time.
we spoke of the beginning of it. of how you can barely look at the person for fear of being found out. and the end of it. of how you can barely look at the person for fear of... being. found. out.
and sam teased me. asked if i still doodled my name across notebooks with the surnames of all the men, the world over, i'd ever been to afraid to look at? and i laughed. tilted my head a little and laughed. no, no of course not. that's not to say i haven't thought about my name next to his. and his. and his and his.
and do you know what sam did in that moment? he didn't make the expected comment about girls and their nonsense, he just leaned back against the bench, took in the water before us, appraised the park in which he'd spent so much of childhood, and said, it's hard for us--us hopeless romantics, isn't it?
and i smiled. fell half in love with him all over again and thought, certainly, it is.
and if i wasn't tethered to sam before, i am now. for that moment--that one right there. that simple moment of absolute inclusion when somehow, i least expected it.
and even if it is hard, and it is, certainly, i wouldn't change it. not for anything.
we're a band of thieves, us hopeless romantics. stealing the world of all its very best love.
in quotes
cherish your solitude. take trains by yourself
to places you have never been. sleep out alone
under the stars. learn how to drive a stick shift.
go so far away that you stop being afraid of not
coming back. say no when you don't want to do
something. say yes if your instincts are strong, even
if everyone around you disagrees. decide whether
you want to be liked or admired. decide if fitting in
is more important than finding out what you're doing here.
believe in kissing.
even ensler
because i love npr. this video. and you get two songs for the price of one.
in ahhh music
three songs (for the price of one), actually.
what cannot.
when i think back on the many years i spent acting my mind gravitates to the space just off-stage. to the countless moments just before an entrance. the great gaping mouth of that threshold between reality and make-believe. the cool, dark nooks ringing-round the edge of light. the sacred space in which fear and potential mingled, lived-side-by-side, drew breaths one from the other.
and then onto the stage. into the space. into the light.
i was never aware of being watched. never aware of even thinking up there. it was...it just was. perhaps the purest, most authentic form of myself. but cloaked under the pretense of...pretend.
(and under the pretense of pretend everything is a bit more real).
i don't miss acting. i don't think i do. if i'm really honest, i don't. and then i feel tremendously guilty for the not. the not missing. the not wanting. the non-pursuit.
but maybe i do. maybe the not is really the non-remembrance. perhaps if i found myself in those wings once more i might suddenly become aware that i have lived the past three years without ever once breathing.
i don't think so. because there is this, this writing. and there are lungs to these words.
but the thing about writing--at least in this domain--is there is an immediacy and a lack of anonymity that i am suddenly finding all-together-terrifying.
i find myself. center stage. staring out. breaking down that fourth-wall. aware of all those eyes.
and i am, for the first time, more aware of what cannot be written than what can.
of how i cannot write of the boy i met on the bus from boston. or the one who took me to a wine bar in the west village. i cannot write about the man who's face i've conjured up so many times i can't remember what he looks like.
point of fact, i cannot write about men at all. except the imagined. always the imagined. only the imagined.
i cannot write about loneliness or the holes in faith that pepper most mornings.
i can't write about the new scented soap that lives in my bathroom and makes me utterly sick to my stomach. how the scent creeps out into the hallway, into the living. room. how i hate that soap. hate what it stands for.
i cannot write about any of these things because these things--these thoughts--are tethered to people. and these people deserve their anonymity, if anyone.
i cannot write about the monotony of the days now abutting one.into.theother. nor how i am suddenly aware that a thinner frame doesn't make any of this easier. i mean i knew that, but now i know that. there's always someone skinnier, blonder, more vibrant.
how it's apathy i find most dangerous. most unnerving. how i take in deep breaths and am met with no air.
i cannot write about how i just want someone to go grocery shopping with. how i went to make dinner for them. do their laundry. it all sounds so terribly un-feminist. so not-of-the-moment.
and if these things are to be written, to be read--if they are to be read would the words lose their air?