Only in Europe

I got the day off for Memorial Day, so I did what every self-respecting American does on this day: I hung out by my apartment complex's pool and read a book on presidential assassinations. It’s called Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell and it’s excellent. She starts out explaining how she relates her world to all the presidential assassinations, out of habit or intrigue. There were a lot of get-togethers with friends where I didn’t hear half of what was being said because I was sitting there, silently chiding myself, Don’t bring up McKinley. Don’t bring up McKinley. I thought about what I relate to my day-to-day experiences on a constant basis.

This weekend, three day weekends sometimes do this, has felt like a month. Maybe it’s because of the upcoming changes that could take place in my life, or the actual time I’ve had to sit and relax and read. My dad just called to arrange travel to LA in August. I feel like I can’t say anything because I don’t know anything yet.

A month after I graduated from college, I met my college friend and boyfriend to go backpacking through Europe for two weeks. They had both been studying abroad for the semester in England, so we met in London and headed to Paris right away. Looking back I had known all along, like most people know when things are too good to be true.

My boyfriend and I broke up in Venice. After the semester abroad things had changed. We still had a majority of the trip left so it was almost impossible to recover immediately. In fact, it would take months of not talking to each other in Boston, then our two best friends from college (one was on this trip) wedding, before we really found a place in each other’s lives again.

After a couple of tense days in Italy, finding some quiet in a couple playing the violin and cello on the streets of Florence, we headed towards Marseille on our way to Barcelona. We arrived in Marseille at the beginning of dusk, and using my newly ex-boyfriends broken French, made it to the right bus on our way to the hotel. We had made this our only hotel reservation, thinking it would be a nice break from all the people and hostels. He asked the bus driver where exactly the hotel was located and the driver kept pointing and speaking in French.

When we got off the bus he revealed that he didn’t really understand the bus driver but that maybe we should just start walking. In the tired, dusk heat we lugged our packs up the countryside hill for about an hour, back and forth. When we walked too far we doubted ourselves and turned onto another street. We hadn’t eaten anything in hours. Cars passed by us; the sun was setting and we were lost in the outskirts of the unfriendly city of Marseille. Then we finally found it.

When we got to the front steps a middle-aged Frenchman greeted us with a warm smile. He helped us into the hotel (which turned out to be more like a bed and breakfast. There were only about five rooms). He offered to drive my ex-boyfriend to a local pizza place, and they had to hurry because it was about to close. I showered while we waited, in what felt like a shower that was created just for me to use at this exact moment. It felt good to finally wash the day off.

We sat in their kitchen eating warm pizza with olives in the middle. The Frenchman’s partner, an American, was watching an Italian movie with French subtitles. He laughed and said: only in Europe. We told him about our upcoming moves to Boston and Chicago, and he told us a story about freezing on the T in mid-March. His partner cooked dinner while we talked. It was around 10 p.m. by the time we excused ourselves so they could eat their dinner alone.

Even then I knew. I knew there would be years to come before I found the peace they had found in the mountains of southern France. Before I could even begin to recapture what I felt in the mountains in Boone. What I hadn’t thought about before then was how much it would be worth it to go through everything to get there.

In the morning we swam in the pool and relaxed before our train ride down the coast of France. The Frenchman checked us out of the hotel, saying good-bye for his partner as well; he had been up late writing and was still asleep when we left. He wished us luck on our journeys, and we left: walked up the path to the road to catch the bus back into Marseille.

some sort of noise

Sometimes, before you even know it, things just change. And you sit wondering how you got somewhere; how if years before now someone had told you this is the life you would be leading you would have laughed in their face. You still wonder.

It’s become that sticky-hot summer weather here in Charlottesville. It’s the kind of weather where you can feel the pollen crowding into your nose and face; the kind where things seem out of focus by mid-afternoon. It’s where you sometimes feel exhausted, like you are constantly moving and walking underwater. Like your body is holding its breath and all you can do is think about the moment you will come to the surface and breathe. It’s haze and soft breezes blowing through my long, white blinds. They clap together.

The fan above my bed is creepily quiet. Almost like it isn’t moving at all, just hanging in the air and pushing it so that it absorbs into the walls. I want to hear it, sputtering around above me doing its job to cool me off, but it continues its silence. Maybe I just want some sort of noise to cover up my thoughts.

I hope to never have regrets for the choices I make, but when they hurt people I care dearly about, I can feel it. Though to say we got much hope, if I am lost it's only for a little while. It’s harder when you are thinking that it’s just the beginning of the end. That you have to give back the record player you just got him for his birthday, and that even when you think caring about someone is enough, it’s a hard truth to find out it’s not. People live like this for longer, accepting graciously what has been given to them, without question. I was not born with this ability. Only with the ability to try and change, which I have been unsuccessful at doing.

I don’t understand how these things work. I only know that when my fan isn’t loud enough I will put on the record player, for the time that it is mine, stare at the empty shelves that will never carry his books, and think about what might have been, but more importantly, what is to come.

A Graveyard on a Hill in Vermont

As a child, I made a list of all the names I knew
and had ever known.

Lois and John and Howard, Gage and Maude
There were two Margaret’s and one Mildred.

After each name I paused, guilting the ink from
my half-melted black pen, hand clammy-wet,

then shaking it hard onto the bright, white page,
ink splattering like leaves, dropping slowly,

all old and brown, from having stayed on the
tree for far too long.

And then I remember Vermont, on a hill, black
metal fence caging us in the day we scrubbed

Names from charcoal and thin, chewy paper
rain falling whenever we pressed and later

hot summer sun rising and breaking through
thick clouds whenever we stopped to break.

Wondering if they wanted to be remembered
or simply left alone.

Re-freakin-union 2007

There’s something about being up at 5 am on a Saturday night, drinking High Life and listening to birds waking up behind Tom Waits’ Closing Time. There’s something about hanging out with a group of college friends until the sky begins to get that black-blue-gray shade. There’s something about knowing that staying up and hanging out will make you tired the whole week but you stay up anyway, waiting for a real reason to go to sleep. Waiting for something to give.

When I feel like I’ve explored a place for long enough, I know immediately that it’s time to move on. And I’ll do anything to make that possible, because change is inevitable, so why not make things happen. What I’ve realized is that the older one gets, the harder it is to make these sudden changes. You can’t just move to Prague and start a whole new life because in this scenario Prague doesn’t even exist. Things become planted where you are and roots begin to grow without you even noticing. It takes something, like a weekend with good friends, to realize how firmly these roots are planted in. And if you even put them there.

On Saturday it was one of those crisp sunny days you would expect in September. We went to the bating cages and then the four of us hit some baseballs on a field out in Maryland. The last time I played baseball was with these guys and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

One of my friends is moving to Las Vegas at the beginning of August, another to Nashville maybe, and another is still deciding. Plans change every week and don’t even require solid plans in the end. There’s something about following your instincts that is inevitable in these situations, but sometimes it seems impossible. Because it costs too much money or there isn’t a job set up. Sometimes I wonder how anyone makes any decisions at all because we create so many barriers.

Is it something about me? Or is it everything? Would you change a few pieces? Or forget the whole thing? ‘Cause there’s something about you, keeps me coming back. I know things will be fine. Fall into line. You’ll still be mine. -Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell

I always feel like no matter where you go, you keep circling back. That things never really change, only recycle. But something was different about this weekend in a way that I can’t explain. There was an uncomfortable change that had occurred, while we were all living in our separate cities. I only really felt it as I got ready to leave to drive back to Charlottesville. Where you are sitting around wanting to talk about something important, but you are too tired to really start that conversation. And time just passes by until it’s getting to be dusk. The sun was a huge, orange circle that settled over the Virginia mountains as I drove out of D.C. I was not really feeling like I’d left anything behind. My toothbrush and face lotion were packed in a bag in the trunk of my car. I just listened to Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell as I drove back to Charlottesville, my mind filled with disappointment and exhaustion.

Sick Day

The day before my ninth birthday I had my appendix taken out. I don’t really remember the pain or the flowers, just little things like my best friend visiting and sitting on my hospital bed and lifting it up way off the ground and then back down. And my brother walking our dog below my high-up window, me waiving down to it as she just jumped and looked around at the ground for a treat. And my mom, staying by my side and sleeping uncomfortably next to me so that I wouldn’t get scared. As a sick child, you don’t really remember the urgency of those around you, just the thoughts of wishing things would get better and knowing that at some point you will be able to go home.

There were many occasions when I tried to fake a sickness so that I didn’t have to go to school that day. When really all I needed was a break from it all, my mom saw it as one more day that I would be behind in school. That I had to keep up with things in order to be successful later on in life. So each time I take a sick day I always feel this pang of guilt that I really could go in to work and get something done. That life doesn’t stop moving even if your body forces you to.

Whenever I get sick I always try to deny it, then I get really angry like something is getting in the way of me. And I assume that things will settle down and if I drink enough water it will go away. After being sick for a week I finally gave in and went to the doctor for help. I had a cold which turned into a sinus infection. I stayed at home and watched movies and slept all day. Just like any other sick day it forced me to really sit back and take a look at my life. I was unable to relax and try to get better because growing up I never really thought that was necessary. Because if you wait long enough, anything will fix itself.

One summer, two of my best friends and I were shopping in a consignment store in downtown Leesburg. Everything was going fine; we were typical middle schoolers trying to waste away the summer time in a growing but small town. I remember feeling this surge of energy, and instead of turning to my friends to talk about it, I just left. Without telling them anything. And I walked back to my house. I really don’t know why I didn’t want to be standing there anymore, in that thrift store, with my two best friends. I just couldn’t shake this feeling that nothing made sense anymore. That without school and other obligations that tied me down I would just drift away.

Recently, my dad also had his appendix out. He called me the day after his surgery to apologize for not being more empathetic of my pain when I was sick in third grade. How he wished he had been more understanding and that he loved me. The funny part is I don’t really remember not feeling supported during my trip to the hospital. I just remember how he carried me into the emergency room after fainting in the bathroom.

All day I’ve been looking up cities like Asheville and Missoula thinking I could just pack my bags and leave Charlottesville. That there are more exciting and peaceful places in the world that I’m missing out on by staying in a commitment. That there’s no use in dreaming anymore because people never really make decisions based on what they really want. They just wait things out until the next thing comes up, hoping to find some sort of peace with where they are at the present moment. This has never been good enough for me and it eats at me each day. I feel like I’m waiting for the moment when I will get up and walk out, without telling anyone.

For Mother's Day

We are on our way back from a weekend in Leesburg, babysitting my mostly new nephew and celebrating Mother’s Day, when we stop at a drive-thru Starbucks outside of Culpepper. A drive-thru Starbucks. I get a Mocha Light Frappaccino (no whip cream) and he gets an iced Mocha. We talk about how family dynamics never really change and how when you are younger, you make the assumption that things will get better the older you get. That at some point, your family will realize you are an adult and that you exist without them. But this never really happens.

My mom and dad admit that my sister is the only one of the three of us that was planned. My brother and I were surprises, as they liked to call us, because when my parents first eloped in Korea they didn’t want to have kids. Four years later my brother was born, and there are only baby pictures to prove it. There exists only one picture of my mom while pregnant, and she’s hiding her round belly under a large overcoat. You can’t even tell she’s really pregnant unless you look really closely.

Last night was prom night outside of Culpepper, Virginia. I know this because the drive-thru barista at Starbucks sleepily tells us this as he hands us our drinks. He apologizes for not being ridiculously customer-friendly, blaming it on prom. I drive away and turn to my boyfriend: we should’ve asked if he lost his virginity. A little down the road we pass a truck and he points out a bumper sticker that says: Pro No Sex with Pro-Lifers. We both agree that that’s a good plan.

Mother’s Day is the biggest holiday of the year for flowers and cards. It’s marketed for weeks, months even, before the day arrives. For Mother’s Day, give an engraved iPod. I think I’ll give an engraved card. One year, I remember getting up really early to make my mom pancakes. The smell filled the entire house, and hoping to get her while she was still in bed, by the time I got them upstairs she was already out of the shower and drying her hair in the bathroom. She yelled from beneath the hairdryer: you know I don’t really eat breakfast, but thank you. I put the pancakes on the ironing board and left to get ready for church.

Once I made a mini-scrapbook out of a magazine about mothers and daughters with Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner on the cover. I pasted pictures of my mom and me, and then wrote notes about how much I appreciated having her as a mom. She told me that she told her best friend that it was one of the nicest Mother’s Day gifts she’d ever gotten.

I’ve only ever really seen my mom get angry twice. Once, I was directly responsible for that anger, when I accidentally backed my dad’s car into a tree in our driveway while learning how to drive stick shift. Do you know how much this is going to cost? I can’t believe you let this happen! The other I was only present for through the ceilings, when I could hear my mom yelling at my dad in the attic. She was crying, and her voice shook and creaked. My mom emerged from the attic, a shoebox in hand. The air conditioning installers had thrown a nativity scene I had made inside a shoebox while in preschool, across the attic thinking it was just a box. She had managed to find all the pieces except for the baby Jesus. The Virgin Mary was decapitated, and nothing seemed to fit inside that shoebox anymore. Now you know what those things mean to me, she said.

Chinese-Japanese Food in Boston’s Chinatown

You are a spicy tuna roll and I am your chopsticks.
We are downtown, in the surrounds of snow and
extra wasabi. You are rolled in sticky white rice-
all soft and raw and pink in the middle. We are
the dog and rat bleeding onto the hard, brown
table. Two sugar packets shoved under one leg.
My arms and hands are large, clunky boots, still
wet dripping cold. There’s soy sauce up to our
ankles now-we are being dipped in it: salty, warm.
Hot water tilts and becomes soft. You are breath-
white on the glass and invisible to the outside…
and it stretches-engulfs you-all dark and damp.
We order bubble tea-leave too good of a tip and
walk out onto the chilly, concrete, narrow streets.

Betting on a Storm in May: Cinco de Derby

I wanted him to write: Y'all have a good marriage, now. And then sign our names. I said it loudly-almost demanded it. But he only wrote the y'all part with something about from below the M-D and best wishes. Up until late Saturday night I had returned to Boston for the weekend feeling at home. Having lived there for a year working with after-school programs and traveling all over the city to parts where the T does not go, knowing I had a grandmother from Arlington, Mass., and an uncle from Melrose, Mass., and after spending Friday night with two friends from Tennessee, I didn't feel the sting of being an outsider until right then: watching him sign his friend's wedding picture boarder at the South Shore Country Club in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Growing up in Leesburg, VA wasn't too different from growing up in Weymouth, MA. One just had a stronger accent than the other. Both served sugar packets on restaurant tables to put into iced tea rather than serving sweet tea and both were the suburbs outside of major cities. I had Waxie Maxie's (which eventually became Coconuts Music) and he had Newberry Comics. Both of our friends from high school and college have begun to get married in distinct rows and seasons. While staying at his parents’ house the whole weekend he made me egg sandwiches and coffee in the morning-mine over-hard while his were over-easy. We talked about how as children the only way we would possibly eat eggs was if they were scrambled, their colors of white and yellow blending into pepper.

The wedding was full of loud south shore Boston accents, a DJ who couldn't even maintain drunken middle-aged dancers on the makeshift wooden floor, and crazy, male-on-male dancing. Which is what happens when a bunch of friends from the same town get together to celebrate the beginning of something and the end of what is known to be true. There was a camera awkwardly recording the whole thing, a bright headlight shining down on everyone, reminding us that the bride and groom will actually be present during the viewing of this recording, alone and on a couch in their new life as husband and wife.

I called my Americorps friend who returned to Kentucky after her year in Boston. I told her that Boston wasn't the same without her, and that she needed to blow off the Kentucky Derby and come hang out with me. Even though I knew this wasn't possible, I still hoped she would call me and say she was waiting at the T stop for me to come pick her up. But she stayed at the Derby and instead, I bet on a horse. Storm in May. It lost. I lost two whole dollars.

All trips up to Boston must include seeing my friend from college who I used to date. Seeing him and thinking of peanut butter and jelly and potato chip sandwiches, The Shins and Ben Folds Five in his dorm room, and sitting in those mountains at the top of the hill with three crosses. It must include drinking in Cambridge or Brookline, then heading back out to Weymouth. Never the same way since there is always construction and will always be construction in the city of Boston. It is its constant. It must include visiting my old boss who now has two children with her partner. Looking at the two new bedrooms with butterflies and airplanes hanging from each ceiling and thinking about how we used to do work at a desk in one of those rooms and how now it is filled with imagination and clouds. It involves realizing how much has changed since I lived there.

Now when I talk to his family and friends I say I'm from the D.C. area. Then I don't have to deal with why I don't have any real accent, and I don't have to explain that my dad is originally from Vermont and my mom from Missouri. I don't have to explain that the one thing Leesburg is now known for is an outlet mall, and how if I had to pick a place to call home it wouldn't even be those mountains in North Carolina anymore. I want to ask them why they stay in the Boston area. Why no one really seems to leave. Why they want him to move back and how I can become a part of things even though I say my o's much differently. But the small talk always ends too soon, and we are onto the next subject, without hesitation.

An Atypical Anti-Feminist Feminist

I am beginning the month of May with Feist, a mixed CD made by a friend called More Than Boobies, and Marie Howe. I plan on continuing through the month with Cat Power, Mates of State, Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney, Smoosh, Tori Amos, Billie Holiday, and poetry by Kim Addonizio and Jesusland by Julia Scheeres. I’ll have to wait to listen to the new Bright Eyes and I can’t start reading Lolita like I’ve been planning to for years.

There’s a place for everything. When I was growing up, I kept all of my Barbie dolls in a pile on the floor, sometimes they were shuffled under my bed or kept in the closet. I only had two Ken dolls, both of which were hideously ugly and misshapen, so when my friends and I coupled off the dolls we had two women together most of the time. Even with their weirdly small waists and pointy feet, they just looked better together. The Ken dolls just threw everything off and most of the time we didn’t even bother to get them out to play with. Things just seemed better that way.

Yesterday after I bought the new Feist CD, my friend and I went to lunch together. It was one of those cool-in-the-shade types of days, and we sat outside, eating rare tuna and French fries. The fact that I had to be somewhere at a certain time drove me crazy. And that’s when I told her this idea, an idea I’ve had for years, was finally coming to fruition. I was going to only listen to or read or watch TV or movies with women as main characters or authors or the driving creative force behind the material. Last time I told her this she asked me why I didn’t just incorporate more women into my life. Why make a deal out of it. She admitted to being an atypical anti-feminist feminist.

After I graduated from college I moved to Boston for a boy. In the locker room at yoga I have to kick myself every time I say I’m sorry when I need to get by someone or I feel like I’m in the way. On the back of the bus in first grade I told a boy that I had a crush on that my best friend (who also had a crush on him) liked him. I’ve allowed a friend to be in an abusive relationship because I thought she was strong enough to take care of herself and it turned out she was strong enough not to ask for help. I resented my mom when she went back to work after our first couple of years in Virginia because it meant I had to stay at the babysitter’s house who only gave me one cookie as a snack. When people told me that I reminded them of my grandma Lois I resented it, thinking that she was difficult and self-absorbed. I slowly allowed my back to peel over, not wearing a bra even after I really needed to. After spending hours and hours in the library of plays in high school, I realized that the world shared my limited view that women had no real voice when I couldn’t find any monologues for class. So instead I wrote my own.

I always say the day I became a true feminist was at the beginning of middle school when I threw all my old Barbie dolls on the roof over and over again until they became scratched and worn; their eyes no longer recognizable and their tan thighs became torn and ugly. Then I left those dolls in the attic to melt in the hot, summer sun. I had the idea that I couldn’t just be a woman, because just women are weak. Feminists are strong.

Maybe it’s the thinking that when you are with a group of women there’s a high chance that at least two or three of them have been sexually assaulted or abused. Maybe it’s the vulnerability I feel when walking even in the safest places alone, or the way my heart beats when a man accidentally walks too close behind me and I gladly let them pass. Maybe it’s the condescension in older male voices when they offer to help you carry something heavy or the naïve tone in my dad’s voice as he tries to tell me that I wasn’t built to carry a window air conditioner down the attic stairs. I don’t plan on changing the world or making myself feel safer by holding my keys between my knuckles, and I don’t plan on carrying a window air conditioner up and down stairs so that I can be strong enough to help my dad. After all, we got central AC a couple of years ago, so those clunky, awkward window units can sit in the attic and collect dust, waiting for someone to come and take them to Goodwill or throw them out.