As we know it

        First

My grandmother stands at the kitchen sink, running her soapy hands over the same chipped dish she has been washing for the last twenty minutes. Her mind is elsewhere: her dark brown eyes gaze out the window above the sink, but she does not notice the trees or grass or birds outside.

                  Her brown hair is impeccably styled in the short bob that is popular at the time. With her dark skin, hair and eyes, she looks exactly like her own mother and grandmother.

But she is not my grandmother yet.

She is 22 years old, and she waits impatiently for news about the man she loves.

She has fallen in love with a young man sent to fight in Europe. This solider will someday be my grandfather.

But he is not my grandfather yet.

It is 1944 and the war in Europe has just ended, but fighting continues. The boy she fell in love with was ripped from her just as she expected a proposal. He was sent from their safe town into an unknown and hostile world to fight a war neither of them fully understood.

When he returns, he will return as a man, not a boy. But at least he will return.

                  They have written to each other as frequently as possible over the last two years. She takes comfort in the knowledge that he will arrive soon, unharmed.

“One of the lucky ones,” he wrote.

Still, she is more nervous about their reunion than she’d like to admit. He should be knocking on her door in the next hour or two.

                  She dries her hands and checks her reflection in the window glass, then fastidiously reapplies her red lipstick. She nervously smoothes the front of her best dress and fidgets with the golden sand dollar necklace at her throat. My grandmother is not a patient woman. She thought she knew what her life would look like: marry the handsome, confident boy she met in high school. They would have a few kids and settle down somewhere close. That’s all she wanted--certainly that wasn’t too much to ask. But God or fate or destiny had other plans: instead of becoming a doting wife, she was stuck living at home, working as a sales girl in a local boutique. The children she wanted were still a distant dream.

It was not his fault—the government’s draft was to blame. Still, she could not help but feel some resentment that her simple wishes for life had been put on hold. She hadn’t asked for fame or riches—just a simple life.

Suddenly, the doorbell rings.

It’s him, finally. The boy, now man. Her soldier.

                  She rushes to the door and flings it open and he is standing there. His eyes shine down on her. He smiles and pulls her out of the doorway and into his arms.

Second

My mother sits quietly on a faded yellow couch with her hands tucked neatly on her lap. Her long hair falls past her shoulders in straight brown sheets that caress the small of her back. The necklace at her throat, a golden sand dollar, shines brightly against her tanned skin. She is the spitting image of her mother.

                  But she is not my mother yet.

                  She is 22 years old, and she is in love.

The man she loves is six years her senior, and he will someday be my father.

                  But he is not my father yet.

I am a distant dream. For now, my mother has other things on her mind. It is 1976, and the world is an uncertain place. The Vietnam War has officially ended, but global unrest continues. The US is sinking deep into the “malaise days” of a recession, and the overall mood is grim in the States.

                  My mother has managed to find a job working at a local hotel. At this hotel, she met a bartender. Someday, she will marry this bartender, and they will become my parents.

                  But they are not my parents yet.

My mother is a planner. She sits on the ugly yellow couch of her parent’s home and envisions the simple future she has always wanted.

                  She wants to marry the bartender. She wants to raise children in the same small town she has known all her life. That is all.

                  My mother never went to college. My mother never learned another language or lived alone in a city or even smoked a joint. But she was content. 

My mother lifts a graceful hand to smooth a strand of long brown hair that has fallen out of place. Today, she is waiting patiently for the bartender to come pick her up at her parent’s house in his 1964 baby-blue Plymouth Valiant. They have been on a few dates, and he has managed to charm her in ways few men could.

                  My mother is a perfectionist. She lifts her dark eyes to the large clock above the door and gives a small sigh. He’s late, per usual. That is a problem: my mother is meticulously time-conscious and considers lateness a character flaw that may have to be corrected in this man.

                  More minutes pass, and my mother, in her annoyance, begins to wonder why she would have chosen this man above the others that attempted to court her. The bartender is so different from anyone she’s met at home: he’s from a poor coal region hours away. He cracks outlandish jokes and says the weirdest things—but he makes her laugh. He’s a bit of a hippie who plays guitar and drives too fast and can strike up easy conversation with anyone.

                  Her parents were unsure about him, but she wasn’t. My mother could see, for all of his oddities, that this out-of-towner would fit well into her life. As different as they were, they both wanted the same things. She was compelled by him in ways she couldn’t explain to anyone, not even herself.

                  Finally, the doorbell rings, and she jumps up to greet the man at the door. As they climb into his blue beater, my future father throws my future mother his typical flirtatious, smirking smile, and she returns it as they drive away.

Third

I shiver slightly as the breeze which rustles the leaves of the trees around me passes over my body. The early winter sun shines on my exposed skin, 

                  I slide the sand dollar along its tangled chain at my neck, and decide to take it off altogether. The morning breeze stirs my already rumpled hair, but I don’t mind—its bushiness is impossible to smooth. I lift my eyes to the sky and they are immediately scorched by the intense country morning sun.

                  I hear my mother calling me, and I turn to see her and my grandmother waiting in the doorway, ready to leave for the day’s shopping trip. They look so similar, standing there in the doorframe. Same plump bodies encased in tanned skin.

                  I look nothing like either of these women. With my light hair and green eyes, I stand out in a family full of brunettes with dark eyes. When I found their senior pictures buried in dusty boxes, I compared them to my own portrait. The only similarity between us is the golden sand dollar necklace tied around each of our necks. You’d never know I was the third generation of these wanting and waiting women.

It is 2012, and I am restless.

                  This lane, leading to a farmhouse atop a hill, has become my place of reflection and solace. The towering trees shelter me from the noise of the road and the curious eyes in the houses across the street. Every morning and night I walk here to think, to dream, and to wait.

                  I am 22, and I have been abroad. I have learned another language and I have danced under flashing lights to foreign music.

A year later, I lived in the biggest city in the world, alone.

                  Both women cannot understand why I would ever want to leave the comfortable town they were each born in and created their own families. At my age, my mother and grandmother had fallen in love with the men they would marry. They planned to stay at home, contented to care for their children.

But I want none of that.

As I walk the lane through the trees, my "future husband" seems like a unicorn: probably great, but entirely mythical. 

And I cannot dream of having children while I still feel like a child myself.

Instead, I wait for adventure. I wait to feel alive again in the way that only a new experience can bring me to life.

For now, however, my mother and her mother are waiting for me. Waiting for the black sheep with blonde hair. 

But I am not so different from them. we all want, and we all wait. 

small things

I'm reading a book for my world literature class, and this part was so beautiful and terribly lovely and I cannot stop thinking about it for I too, once felt this way.

"Being with Chacko made Margaret feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them-- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
  In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself."

I hope to write this well some day.

Chapter 1.

CHAPTER ONE

People who have witnessed a tidal wave, the ones who survive it, say that the first sign of the destruction to come is the “drawback.” The water along the shoreline recedes to a point much farther out than usual, exposing areas of beach normally unseen. The raw and rarely revealed seabed lures those souls curious as to what the ocean usually hides under her murky covers. For once, the ocean’s secrets lay uncovered and on display, inviting all to come and discover. Feet sink into dark virgin sand that has never felt the caress of human skin. But the sea is a siren, claiming these souls as her own.
            “I’ll show you, but I’ll have to kill you,” she says.
For too much has been revealed: a blanket of dark and churning water swells and expands to cover the shore, smothering anyone trapped underneath.
           
Faye almost drowned once. Not in a tidal wave, but in a rip current on a sunny day at the beach with her family two years ago. She’d always loved the ocean; its shadowy vastness remained a constant mystery, impervious to time and human concern.
Faye preferred the days when the water was fierce and choppy, those days when turning her back to the deep was impossible for fear of the towering waves. The sea is impossible to predict- perhaps that was its appeal. To stay above the waves on those rough days was a fight; each oncoming wall of water a small battle requiring constant vigilance. No feeling matched the satisfaction of emerging from the ocean on days like that: warmth finally caressing skin made raw and hair become tangled from the skirmish. She would flop on a towel and catch her breath, letting the sun turn the salt water into a thin crust baked onto her skin.
            The day Faye almost drowned was not like this. On the last day of her vacation the sea was disappointingly calm and the water was crowded with swimmers enjoying the peace. Floating was possible today, and Faye found relaxing on the waves rather than fighting them to be a strangely pleasant sensation. She lay on her back and felt weightless. Boundless. The water pulled at her dark hair, splaying it out like a fan on the surface. The bright sun scorched her retinas and she closed her eyes, breathing deeply.
On this day, the ocean stole every sense but one. Her closed eyes and submerged ears were useless but she smelled everything, and everything was ocean. Salt water invaded her nose and pores and every opening until she felt she became water herself, drifting along with the current. How long she lost herself in the water, Faye did not know; she could have been floating for minutes or hours.

Later, she would scold herself for relaxing; she should have known better. The ocean is unpredictable: Faye knew and respected this trait. So when she felt the tugging at her toes, strong enough to interrupt her daydreams, she should have realized immediately what was happening. But the ocean already had her. 

          Faye did not think of this incident again until her freshman year of college. In those first Dark Days she could feel her head slipping underwater but could not remember how to come up for air. To drown daily but never die was the worst possible feeling—held underwater by her own mind and flailing but losing strength. Or perhaps worse was that no one saw her struggle, or knew how to save her if they did. Time had no meaning or control over her life: days and nights blended into one long Darkness. Faye looked but could not see, and heard but could not listen as the world she once loved and understood flickered before her vision like a fast-forward movie.

One night during the early Darkness, Faye found herself sitting next to her mother on her worn couch. She could not remember why or when she had sat there, but those details, like most, did not matter to her. The Bad thoughts were at the worst they’d ever been: they echoed endlessly in her mind, burning into her brain and clouding her vision. She closed her eyes and wished to sleep. A brief respite. 
But her mother was talking. She opened her lids and looked around the room- she was the only other occupant. These words were for her.

“Can you believe what happened to that poor young man? What a darn shame.”

Confused, Faye looked up at the images on the television. She hadn’t even noticed it was on. Deliberately concentrating on the screen required painful focus and attention, but her mother was waiting for a response, so she endured. The program was called, “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.” In this episode, a couple on their honeymoon in Japan had unknowingly wandered too far out on a receding coastline, only to be crushed by the tidal waters. The man survived. He never found his wife’s body. The blue screen illuminated the dark room as water; water everywhere, crushing everything, flashed again and again. Her mother was talking, muttering meaningless words drowned out by the roar of the crashing waves.
Faye watched the widower cry, unable to take her eyes off of the screen. She had forgotten what interest felt like. The man twisted the wedding band on his finger as tears spilled from his dark eyes. The tears fell and fell and she wished to hold a bowl under them, collecting the drops so the man could sink into the salt water to join his dead wife.

“This show should be called, ‘I Don’t Want to Be Alive’.” she said finally.

Her mother studied her with a slight frown.

“Why? He’s lucky to have survived that tidal wave.”

Lucky. Faye looked at the man and thought that he was anything but lucky. No, the lucky one was the wife, the one who escaped the sadness and emptiness she was sure the man was drowning in.
Drowning. A memory pulled at the edges of her mind, demanding attention. The waves roared on the screen and suddenly she was back in the ocean, and she was dying. But damnit, she was fighting. Faye sat on the ugly couch but her mind was in the sea, back to that day two years before. Grabbed by the tide and dragged to the bottom, she’d kicked furiously against the waves, searching for the surface but finding only water, water that filled her mouth, nose and ears with its briny fingers.
Faye assumed she was going to die. Her rather rational brain quickly calculated the chance of winning against the infinite strength of the ocean, and the odds were not good. Her mind knew this but her body did not accept and it searched for air; legs tangling in arms and hair and seaweed, until it too realized she was dying. So she stopped; struggling and let go of the fight. Her lungs burned for air but she let the ocean have her.
And a few moments later, it spit her out on the shore. Bleeding, bruised, and weeping, but alive.

Past

Once, a long time ago, I was content.

I remember those times when the days were long, so long. I would wake to the sun streaming in my window and at night I'd sleep deeply on clean pink sheets.

I remember yanking the green coats from ears of corn, tearing off its hair and feeding it to the backyard cows. My hair, too, was the color of corn silk and it blew long and free and tangled in the summer wind.

I never saw my Amish neighbors as different from me. They were, and still are, my people.
My first friend, Katie, was Amish and her and I would lay in bed and giggle-- her hair in a tight knot and a long black dress wrapped around her legs. I lay beside her in pigtails and cotton shorts, but we felt no different.

I read my first books in a green-curtained room of my Amish babysitter. They were all faded Dick and Jane volumes from the sixties and they smelled gloriously of old paper. If I think hard enough I can remember the distinct scent and it always, always makes me happy.

My babysitter would make me sandwiches: the most delicious sandwiches smothered in jam and thick cheese on fluffy bread. I'd sit in her barn for hours, sneaking the horse bits of feed or chasing down the feral cats that never took a liking to me.

My next-door neighbours had a trampoline. I'd begged my parents to get me one, but my mom was deathly afraid I'd break my neck. She disapproved when I snuck next door to jump, but I was obsessed. I'd bounce for hours, sometimes alone, but often with my sister. We'd start in the heat of the summer day and watch the sun go down beyond the corn fields at night. Even now, it's easy to remember what that hot black plastic felt like under my feet, and how free I felt to fly for a few seconds.

I realize now how alone I was. Other than my sister, I had but one friend nearby. I spent much of my time roaming the fields and meadows and backyards like a tiny nomad. I had no boundaries.

"I wished we lived in a neighborhood. You need friends Erin," my mother would say, over and over and yet I saw suburbia as a concrete hell. To separate myself from the rusty swings in the Amish schoolyard and the crow of the roosters would be unimaginable. Lethal.
I was alone but not lonely. My world was the strangely comforting stench of cow manure and the sharp, clean smell of grass from my fathers' lawnmower. My feet were dirty and my skin was tanned, kissed by the sun.
My childhood was perfect.

Here.

"I don't want to drive," I said. So I sat myself in the passenger seat, squashed beside him in the bumper car. Our friends sat around us, waiting to be released, our excitement palpable. I squirmed eagerly in my seat.
It was dusk; the light was fading fast.
How strange we looked, dressed to the nines in our suits and dresses and heels and shiny shoes and yet we grinned like children as we careened around and around in circles. We collided into friends and strangers and our heads snapped back as we laughed.
I was screaming with laughter; with mirth or joy or exhilaration or whatever you want to call it: this moment was freedom, pure and sweet.


The pink and blue and yellow lights blurred around us as our knees bumped together. We screeched with laughter, He and I. Carefree and perfect.


Over a year later, a different He and I drank beers in a sprawling backyard lit only by headlights. "I'll go first," I said. I ran then, pumping my legs furiously before throwing myself on the wet, soapy tarp. It was cold and the water sprayed into my contacts but it took me down, down, delightfully fast. I spilled out onto the grass and the blades cut into my skin but I didn't care. He slid behind me, much faster and more graceful. His muscles rippled under his skin when he stood, grinning and covered in grass.
We stood there like childish fools, drenched in soap and green weeds. When I grabbed his hand he let me thread my fingers through his and we ran back up the slippery blue tarp, skating on the beads of water and dodging the other slip-n-sliders. His hands were big and dark and mine were small and pale and yet I remember we laughed alike as we skidded together in the black and blue summer night.

This may sound strange, but I used to think that when I died, I could ask God to show me the greatest moments of my life over again. I always wondered what those would be, but I've decided that perhaps these would be the moments I wish I could have just one more time.

Times Change

Last year my Grandmother had a stoke.
I thought she was going to die. My family thought she was going to die. She was convinced she was going to die.
I was leaving for England soon, and I didn't think I'd see her when I returned. So when my mom volunteered for me to stay over with her for a few nights to keep her company during winter break, I didn't mind.

She'd come home from the hospital a different person.
This woman, who was fond of smacking asses and calling me a "sexpot" and sped like a maniac at 88 years old, was now a ghost, a walking shell of a person. A bag of loose skin and faded eyes and varicose veins that wrapped around her legs like vines.

She sat on her couch all day wrapped in blankets, staring at the television but not actually watching it.
I would sit beside her and dutifully clip her Sunday coupons like she'd done her whole life.
Dove shampoo, overpriced cat food, McDonald's breakfasts.

I liked to touch her hands.
I'd marvel at how beautiful they remained even with the skin so lose on the bones it felt like it'd just slide right off.
She never took off her rings, the bands of diamonds and rubies she'd been given decades before when she was young and pretty.
I'd put my hand beside hers and wonder if I'd ever reach the age in which my skin was no longer flesh-colored but a swirl of purples and blues. If I'd have a granddaughter with young and healthy hands I'd envy.

At night she would recline her chair and I'd sleep in her bed.
This huge bed- man, I loved it. King sized, I could fit four of me in it comfortably.
It smelled like her: that comforting smell I'd known all my life but never really noticed until I was wrapped in it and clinging on to it, knowing that someday I wouldn't remember it.

But the bed was too big. It wasn't meant for one person.
She'd been sleeping alone in it for 12 years.

Her husband used to take up some of the space- that giver of her rings, they had bought this bed and that couch and built this house. Together.
and then he'd died, and she was left with a too-big bed and a diamond ring that didn't sparkle like it used to.

I knew she slept on the left side so I slept on the right, hoping to undo some of the 12 years of iniquity.
But in the morning I'd wake up on the left-- maybe her body had formed a gully, a ravine in the mattress that held her there on the left side and captured me as well.

I wonder what it was like- that change to sleeping alone. When she'd slept with him beside her for so long, but now his side was cold and clean and didn't smell like him.
I wonder if it pulled her under, but she let it.

In the cold mornings I'd make coffee and eggs and force her to take small bites even though she'd screw up her face like an angry toddler.
She used to cook for me, and now I for her.
Change.

I asked her questions I'd never cared about before: what high school was like, her first love, her first kiss, her relationship with her sisters.
And she'd tell me. Her speech was slow and the those memories were covered with dust because no one had asked her in so long.

When I left for England I told her I'd call her, and I did. I told her what I saw from my window and how bad the food was and how much I missed feeding the squirrels together while drinking coffee on winter mornings.
She'd tell me to not miss her.
Go have fun, she'd say.


Despite her predictions, I did see her months later when I returned.
We clip coupons and go for breakfast and watch birds.
I am changing but she is not, and that's ok.
Maybe she's had enough change for one lifetime.

Sometimes you find a Gem

At my NYC internship, I read manuscripts of people desiring to become published authors. The large majority of them are shit. However, I was given a full manuscript today and a part of it actually brought tears to my eyes.

I love this. The main character, Lou, is talking to her mother who has Alzheimers and doesn't remember her.

“Have you ever loved, Lou the pretender?”

I flinched at the turn in conversation.  “No.”

“Good, then you might survive this life.”  Her fingers brushed across the spine of a green hardcover.  “Love burns at first, right in the middle of you.  Eats you up on the inside, and you want it to.  The only salve that cools is him.  There’s exquisite pleasure in that pain.”
Wetness filled her lashes, but didn’t break over.  “And then the fire goes out, and you’re left burning, burning so hot it’s agony, wild and unstoppable, until it reduces you to nothing but husk and ash.  And when you rise like the phoenix …” Mum turned to face me, nearly looking herself again in all of her haughty superiority.  “Do you know what the worst part of love is?”

Stunned, I shook my head.

“The worst part is that despite the pain, the loneliness, the agony so bad you don’t know how you survived it, you know that if he appeared before you again, even for a moment, you’d do it all over again for just one more taste of that exquisite pleasure.  You’d suffer again, burn again, wander lost in your ashes again, just for one … more … second, one more touch, one more … kiss.  You’re better off never knowing love.  It will kill you in the end.  It always does.”

Stunning.

Passion

My greatest fear is living a life in which I feel nothing.


I realize that perfection is overrated. Beautiful people are usually the most boring.



I've met a few people in my life that have changed me so deeply, and they don't even know it. The best part is, from the outside they look so ordinary. So unremarkable.


Do you have to agree with everything I say? I would much rather you tell me how you really feel.

YELL AT ME if you want. If I say something stupid or out of line, call me on it.

Give me a reason to be mad at you. Make me feel something, even anger, for rage is better than nothing.
           Wake me up.


I fear a predictable life.

However, I crave safety. At the end of the day, we should still love, and be secure in that love.

You don't have to say the right things and have it all together. Be messy. Surprise me. Intrigue me.



            Compel me.

Unless it's mad, passionate, extraordinary love it's a waste of time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love should not be one of them."