lycanthropia

This influence at the age of forty or forty-one marks a period of major transition in your life. This is the crisis of middle age when you have to come to terms with a number of realizations that may not all be pleasant. For example, even though you are not very old, you are no longer young. Have you accomplished or begun to accomplish what you wanted when you were younger? If you have, was it an appropriate accomplishment for you? Are you happy with your close relationships, your marriage, your work?

Many people encountering this influence discover that the answer to several of these questions is no. If this is your situation, you may become seized with a feeling of urgency that you have only a short time to correct the problem. Consequently you may begin to act rather disruptively and quickly. You may leave a marriage or an old job and take up a lifestyle quite different from your earlier one. Your friends are likely to be rather shocked at the change. You may spend more time with younger people, for their youth is a symbol of the opportunities you feel you have almost wasted. This seems to be your last chance to take advantage of those opportunities.

It is also quite possible that you make none of these drastic changes. If you have taken advantage of opportunities right along and have not allowed your life to become prematurely old and rigid, this time will not be so upsetting or disturbing. You will experience the real meaning of this influence—a climax of the direction your life has taken since childhood and a shifting of direction toward the issues you must confront in old age.

If you have been successful in your dealings with the outside world, you will continue to be, but now it will have to mean something in terms of your own life and perception. You will not be able to live for some external purpose, the purpose must come from within. If you don’t reorient yourself, your life will become hollow and meaningless, regardless of what you accomplish from here on.

Uranus Opposition Uranus, end of March 2011 until 18 February 2012

“I hope that every writer will be as persistent as her resources and circumstances permit, and that despair, however much it impinges, will never defeat any writer who has talent and devotion.” (Don Share)

Days like today when I wish I could be a real faery godmother, and not just a kind of limp ineffectual long-distance one. When I wish I could transplant 7+ years of insight-oriented psychotherapy and 6+ years of fairly intense Zen practice and especially 4+ years of DBT and a kickass 2 years of Al-Anon, inject it right straight into the body-minds of my beloved almost-daughters suffering so hard, so blazingly, so purely. When I wish I could just roll up the dialectic into a tight sweet little pearl-bolus of wisdom and place it gently between their lips so they could swallow it and wake up tomorrow free of all the snarl-ball tangle of self-loathing which underpins all the mocking destructive thoughts that always end in what seems like a perfectly logical conclusion: “and so the answer to ending the pain is, hurt/kill yourself.”

Not that I don’t know that you have to learn for yourself how to track out and trace that thought—because it is wily, that thought, it comes perfectly camouflaged, and you’re sitting there in bright disgust thinking with what seems to you like great clarity: “The problem isn’t that I hate myself, that’s ridiculous! The problem actually is that I SUCK and why don’t I do the right things for myself and what’s my DAMAGE, I am a broken defective person, terminally deficient, I can never do anything I’m supposed to do, I will never be better, this is unbearable, it goes on and on and it never ends and I can’t stand it,” and other such totalizing permissive thoughts, every single one an understandable cognitive distortion, heftily sponsored by a steep dip in serotonin and dopamine, all of which is the trickiest of all because it’s your MIND, and you think you know your own mind—you think you know your own mind! how hilarious! but we do, because we have this deeply persistent, fixed illusion that we’re actually the ones in there running it—so you take these thoughts as being real, and personal, and factual, and informative.

But as the Professoressa said to me in my wracked twenties, so many years ago, her sharpness always cutting through my extremely fancy and well-scaffolded self-deluded twisted-inward rage, my perfectly architectured Clever Girl double-binds, built solidly but on completely false premises (life as it is being lived is unbearable; I can’t do anything better/smarter than I’m already doing it)—as she said to me then, plainly, simply, in a way even I was able to hear: “That thought is not offering you any information.” Just like that. The thought is empty. It pretends to be important, it pretends to bear meaning, to tell me something I don’t know, to tell me something useful,—but it is devoid of information, it is the mock orange, the styrofoam food in the shop window. Empty. Meaningless. Just inner raving that sounds like real thinking but actually is just me slashing at myself in blind lacerating pain, I don’t know where else to put this, I’m having a feeling and it must be someone’s fault, so I’m going to say it’s mine, because that’s the easiest way to think about it and that’s the way I’ve always thought about it, so—

Not seeing that if I keep allowing these thoughts traction and weight, keep feeding them and making them little nests in my mind, keep uttering them aloud viciously and reinscribing them with my sentences and my words and my actions and above all my brilliant brilliant mind—that I am slowly and surely killing myself. Stoning myself to death. Death by a thousand cuts. That I will inevitably TALK myself into psych units and emergency rooms and eventually a small urn which holds my ashes and over which my friends pray and disavow what is happening and scream-weep. And I know that side of it now. Standing in the desert, swaying back and forth with a dozen people, all of us streaked with tears and sweat and ashes, those sticky gray ashes, stabbing my index finger angrily down into the little brass bowl and howling at J., just raging at his remains, if he were standing there I would have unhesitatingly slapped him hard across the face, Do you see what you’ve done to these people, everyone here loves you, do you see what you’ve done—

Nietzsche said a man must find his own father. I sought out three faery godmothers and four therapists who were able to hold my hand as I flailed and thrashed and twisted every which way to avoid what had to happen, to avoid the Rilkean truth of you must change your life. I was dead set on blaming someone—them, me, the men, me, someone, it sometimes didn’t matter whom—and I felt completely unequal to the task of setting myself on any kind of course of recovery. I still feel unequal to it. And my feet are on it because I realized I do it in the smallest ways, increment by increment, tiny action by tiny action. I can’t put comments on 54 papers and when I think I have to, I want to feed myself through a wood chipper. But I can put comments on one paper, when a friend is there to make dinner and give me a little shove. And I no longer feel like that’s cheating—I know that’s part of being a human, and being in community. We evolved to help each other, we did not evolve to do things all alone, in some kind of weird myth of Yankee exceptionalism that insists we should, I don’t know, vault out of bed at 5 am and have all the day’s work done by 11 am. I guess there are people like that. Those people don’t have the predispositions we have. They’re attorneys or doctors or something, I’m sure they’re wonderful people and many of them are my friends and I adore them too. And that’s not what I am. I’m something else. And whatever I am is a fine thing to be.

And I will leave you with this, which I read when I was a troubled 20-year-old college dropout, locking myself in my grandmother’s bathroom (my grandmother! the person who loved me hardest, with the fewest strings attached!) to will myself to drop that ridiculous old rusty razor blade on the inside of my thigh, and cursing myself when I couldn’t—I read this in some Plath scholarship, because of course I was obsessed with Plath and was reading through all ten books available at the time, in 1990—I read it and I thought, this is a thread. This is a strand to hold onto. This is hope. And it’s a paraphrase of what F. said to me on the phone a week ago, in fact, and this is how faery godmothering works, that sometimes your charges say it right back to you, and you hear what you say to them in your own bones, and it carries you all. The truth (not the stupid shrilling “thoughts”)—the truth carries you all. You can rest in it, when you’re too tired to even think about taking the next step, making yourself the cup of tea, sitting down and taking a deep breath—to think instead, as my mother used to tell me when I was wrestling with myself, even as a little girl, smoothing back my hair with a worried look in her eyes because she could already tell how hard I was going to be on myself, for the rest of my life: You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Nemerov shares with Stevens and Plath certain basic assumptions: that poems are “not the point” in the natural universe, and that the poet, therefore, is not in the same field of experience as the swallows. Poetry, coming from the mind of man, not from the objects of mind’s perception, is somehow a self-conscious, uneasy activity that must apologize for itself. […] This is a tragic assumption in that it certainly banishes the poet himself from the world: only if he will give up poetry and “find again the world” has he a chance of being saved. It is a paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception—whether swallows, trees, sheep, bees, infants—only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function?—that the adult imagination is superior to the imagination of birds and infants?

In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide.

(Joyce Carol Oates, “The Death Throes of Romanticism“)

WTF, I never look at shoes, I hate shoes, but here I am looking at these and thinking I might actually want a pair, this is what February has done to me.

When I start brooding obsessively over and collecting pictures of pretty things like this—during seminar, even!—then I know I am in a bad way. Driving home hunched over, staring forward blankly, thinking I can’t think about it, can’t think about all the papers I have to put comments on between now and May 1, can’t think about the life of teaching comp that stretches out before me endlessly, because I have too many people depending on me and I can’t just go to bed and not get up, not now, not now—

So instead I look at pretty pictures of striped socks, in many colors.

Are these not in fact the prettiest rainboots ever created? I suspect they may be. “Confess, you dog, and be candid!” (George Gordon, Lord Byron)

Thank GOD they are no longer available, as otherwise I would be forced, FORCED I tell you, to purchase $200 wellies. An act which, while positively barbaric, no longer seems quite as out of the question as it once did, especially after being deluged upon all day yesterday at school, drenched several times head-to-toe despite my suddenly flimsy blue raincoat, and I’m thinking particularly of the moment when I emerged out of my second class to see students giggling and running in the opposite direction. “That’s odd,” thought I, forging ahead toward the sidewalk, only to step squarely into a foot-deep unintentional water feature which then went sloshing over the tops of my leather boots (hand-me-downs from Mom). As I plowed through the little ocean, contemplating this rain which falls so rapidly the drains cannot drain it all swiftly enough, I noticed many charmingly fashionable female students making their way through puddles undaunted, all wearing equally pretty rain boots. A pair of which, I determined, I must possess.

So today I ordered these, for a more modest $35 inclusive of shipping:

There was another, taller pair I almost got; but they were $50, and that seemed somehow excessive. I hope these’ll be tall enough. I also hope I learn not to stride recklessly into foot-deep water features (and this one was about forty feet across, so once I was well in it, I couldn’t easily get out).

Pretty rain boots! So exciting! Anyway if you’ve lived the last few years in the Sonoran Desert, they’re exciting. Anyway I’m excited. Anyway when it’s February and the semester yawns out before you with its reams of ungraded student essays and unwritten research papers, to spend a couple of blank hours musing over pretty things with flowers and patterns and bright colors, is deeply soothing.

Most days are pretty much exactly like you thought they would be. The alarm goes off and it all starts from there. This morning I expected to be no different from any other mid-semester morning. I lay deeply asleep, dreaming of a futuristic era in which everyone sat around on green lawns discussing philosophy in white robes, mostly devoid of secondary sexual characteristics—sort of a Logan’s Run meets the pre-Socratics kind of thing.

Et alors there I was, asleep profoundly, motionless, the way you can deep-sleep when you know you don’t have to teach that day—when about five minutes before the alarm was due to go off, a certain next-door person came stealthily into my house, bearing a large white plate heaped with…with what? What’s going on? Hello? Who are you? Pyewacket and I peered from the duvet in bewilderment. He smiled almost apologetically.

“I brought you this.”

This turned out to be French toast made from challah, with butter, syrup, Nutella, almond butter, powdered sugar, and, just in case the point had not been made sufficiently, whipped cream. I blinked and wondered whether I looked like a crazy sound-asleep woman who has just been offered a restaurant-worthy plate of French toast. I felt certain that I did.

Nonetheless Pyewacket and I welcomed him into the bed. He offered me a fork. Pye delicately sampled the whipped cream.

French toast. On a day. Today. Completely unexpectedly.

So it was with light step and springtime heart that I put on a sweater and walked round the corner to the Black Hole, an attractively named coffee place where I was due to meet with this semester’s workshop leader. I ordered a pot of Red Velvet tea (more decadence! $2.75! with half-and-half, and agave); sat down to speak with him; and then to my surprise, my springtime bonheur turned into…well.

Allow me to excerpt from an email to a friend wiser about all this than I:

Meeting with N. this morning…at which meeting, God help me, I got all choked up and fierce and emotional. Also he looks way too fucking much like my ex, which I knew would be the case even before I met him; but that’s okay. To test his mettle I gave him a copy of Cherry-emily, the long poem which nobody has really read all of and liked except B. and Norman Dubie (though God if any two people had to like my work, I’d pick those two) (and Ms. F liked the part she read, but it was too long for the journal and they didn’t want to cut it)—anyway I am going to use this as a test. If he passes, I might be able to trust him. We talked about L.; he was on a committee that awarded her a prize for her last book, and is still indignant that he had to armwrestle the other judges into giving her the prize, instead they wanted to give it to some quote “ancient old poet” for an edition of collected poems that was probably going to win a whole bunch of other prizes anyway. But he prevailed and apparently L. told him later it’s the only book prize she’s ever won, which is so hard to believe, because she’s so fucking good—

Anyway the point is, he seems to get her work? And he likes what she does? So since I adore her, that seems like a good sign. I just suddenly found myself telling him honestly that I’m thinking of dropping out, in all senses of the word. Getting out of the game. For the first time in my adult life, taking that thought seriously. That it’s not last semester alone—I’ve had Nobel laureates tell me point-blank they didn’t like my writing and I sailed on unassailedly, cheekily, confidently; but now something, and not just last semester, but the whole cumulative lifetime of trying and trying and not quite reaching has more or less suddenly knocked the stuffing out of me. Just knocked it out. (I didn’t mention that an Irish alcoholic rampaged through my psyche/heart as well, though that is probably relevant, since it’s part of the origin or source of this whole constellated wad of affect, expressed in the content: I have wasted my life.)

And as I confessed this, he at first was quite predictable about it: “Oh but you can’t think about publication, or who will read your stuff in a hundred years, you can’t worry about whether the writing is good,” just as I would have said to one of my own students, just as I have been directing myself for so long; and but I was all suddenly sharp and premenopausal and blazing eyes (“I enjoy your caustic moments!” he’d said cheerfully to me a few minutes earlier)—I flared up and responded more or less dismissively: “Yeah, sure, great, so that’s what I always thought too but you know what that shit was a lot easier to tell myself when I was 30, 35, 40, and it’s not so easy to believe it doesn’t matter anymore when every peer/senior here and at publishing houses reads what I’m doing and DOESN’T LIKE IT, N. THEY DO NOT LIKE THAT SHIT. I’m not sure which of you even wanted me here. And I—do you know the Rickie Lee Jones song ‘Last Chance Texaco‘?” He nods, not taking his eyes off me, because he is finally getting it that I am fucking serious. “Well this is kind of like that. Either I figure out what I’m doing that’s not working, or I just quit doing it, and go back to the Southwest and buy a trailer and get my adjuncting job back. Because 20+ years is a long time to keep telling myself, ‘Fuck them, I don’t care if they like what I’m writing.’” He nods, his eyes still on mine, lets his canniness show by switching tacks: “Do you like your poems?” Me: [thrown off] [but again tartly:] “It gets hard to like your baby when no one else does.” [I immediately know I've said the wrong thing; he's crazy about his own child; plus my feelings about my writing are not easily summarized: of course I want it to be better, but of course I also like some things I've done, but of course wish I had been able to do what I tried to do more perfectly. And in my twenties, not now.] N., immediately: “That’s not true, you love your baby!”

—At which point his next student appears and I pack up my tea things and depart. Angry at myself for tears. Brusque because that’s how I get when I’ve let someone see what is really going on with me.

Then I walk back to my house, check on Pyewacket (asleep in sun with paws over eyes), and go next door to tumble on the sofa with the neighbor, who immediately falls sound asleep and begins twitching/flailing limbs and breathing, shall we say, sterterously; so after a brief cuddle I come back to my place “to do work”; and as you can see this is the kind of work I have been doing so far.

Friday is the deadline for the Poetry Foundation contest. I just, I do not know what to send to them, at all, at all.

It’s Tuesday; the PoFo contest deadline is Friday. I have nothing but classes in between now and then. I don’t know what to do to the manuscript. Sending it the way it is would simply ensure rejection. They wouldn’t touch a 25-page long poem about sex work with a bargepole. The lyrics around it, maybe, if I took K’s suggestion and excised them and mingled them with some older pieces, a few more narrative, a few more descriptive. Some different strategies, rather than, over and over again, what last semester’s instructor referred to with faint distaste as “these first-person monologues.”

Always this box out of which I have been trying to break for years now. Not A, but not B. The aesthetic double-bind. You can’t be what you are but you can’t be anything else. What else then. What. There must be something else. What. What. Think of it. Think. What. What. Think of it. What. What. What.

And everything goes along at the same time, all the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful. I empty the dishwasher, make cream of cauliflower and potato soup with chopped fresh parsley on top, take a long shower, recycle the empty shampoo bottle, pet the cat who comes in yowling, clip my nails, drink fizzy water, sigh, watch episodes of House, MD while reading articles and underlining them, and what do you know, sometimes people bring me French toast for breakfast. This one’s for them.

Heart, be clean. Fists, be open, numb.
Most lovely

Lovely, let me be wrong in almost every
Thing. That the page is waste, all that rag

Content. That even despairing relentlessly cannot

Spare you what you fear the most.
Gamine, you are growing

Old now; it’s your time. If you wait here
For the noises of this night,

They will sound out as the rustling of autumn,
Spiky, dried of unctuous

Airs, blazing like a chestnut horse on fire in
The padlocked barn;

It is time it will be time.

—Lucie Brock-Broido

I have enough decency to feel embarrassed for posting yet another Whitney video, the interwebs falling all over itself to supply us with them endlessly as we all indulge ourselves per usual in celebrity tragedy; but. But I’m doing it anyway because this one mattered a lot to me in the first stunned numb post-desertion weeks, and actually I think it first came into my head the day I walked into our house to find half the stuff gone. I didn’t believe I’d rather be alone. Frankly I would have preferred together and unhappy, and then working on the unhappy part. But I wasn’t given the choice, so—

This is the one for dancing to, the Thunderpuss remix (for its furious energy) (the Club 69 one’s good too); but I also like the quiet album version, when her voice is at its most gospelly. The long held high notes (“you were making a FOOL of ME!”) always bring tears to my eyes. Also, the supportive chorus of other women who have somehow also survived being discarded like fast-food wrappers. Also, um, LEATHER DRESS.

Honestly even the title’s meaningful to me—it’s like Tori and the Böse reminding themselves, “I’m okay when everything / is not okay.” I can get through, I can survive (Live Through This!); I can breathe and move, staring at a bookshelf with half the books gone. A row of DVDs and videotapes toppling over into the newly empty space. The inexplicable things someone leaves behnd rather than deal with them, the clothes apparently unwanted or the toiletries, shoving them into paper bags blindly, forbidding myself to think—just pack, just pack and move, don’t think, just move—

Pay your light bill, take care of your babies—

Gentle reader, I write to you from beneath the duvet, con gato, which is where I’ve been (with a couple of dramatic interruptions) since this time yesterday. I have an unusually terrible period upon me (though they’ve been worsening lately?), plus my new friend BV (um, I don’t really like this friend); and thus I am splot, with maddening itching and burning as well as the usual stabby pain, and none of it is particularly fun. However. I am going to seize the supine moment to write a clunky poorly crafted blogpost, just so there’s something here and I don’t forget that I actually do this. When I am not all beFebruaried and besemestered and bebacteriaed.

(One of the dramatic interruptions from supinity was that last night I went downstairs for some crackers so I could take more painkillers and opened the cabinet door and a large full green-glass bottle of olive oil LEAPT, I swear it actually SPRANG, out of the cabinet onto my breastbone, and I grabbed at it reflexively and thought for a triumphant moment I had caught it, but no, it bounced heartily off my chest and hit the floor and when I say “a million little pieces” I am not talking about made-up memoirs, but about a giant spreading pool of extra virgin olive oil filled with infinitesimal grains of green glass, a small sea of gritty sponge-shredding debris that laughed tauntingly at my mop. So I put sheets of newspaper over the mess, the cat out, and pants on; drove to CVS and picked up Metrogel for my BV and a Swiffer; and an hour later, finally sat down to eat some leftover brown rice and quinoa, sautéed with arugula and some of the neighbor’s extra virgin olive oil, all my own being wadded in the trash with newspaper and still lightly coating the kitchen floor. So, um, that happened.)

Here are some other things that have been happening. Not in order of importance.

Last Friday I had a manuscript conference with the professor who, last semester, taught the master workshop (in which one assembles one’s manuscript) and who is known for his deftness with ms arrangement. I want to submit to the Dickinson Prize (which seems perfect, being for unpublished spinster poets like me) and am pretty damn sure that the PoFo is going to convulse with giggles if I send them the ms the way it is now, so. The professor was very flattering and kind, and also very clear about—about the manuscript’s limitations as he saw them. Its—for lack of a better word, its monotony in terms of poetic strategies. His primary suggestions were a) to go back and mine older manuscripts for poems that work differently, to create variety, and b) to cut it from 91 pages to 48. These were I thought excellent suggestions and it wasn’t until maybe 24 hours later that various small subtleties of our conversation struck me afresh, with unpleasant premenstrual hormanal [sic! ha ha ha! but I meant hormonal] emotional repercussions.

Ay yai yee.

The next day I drove to North Dallas for Ms. J’s surprise birthday party (and she was indeed surprised; in fact I thought privately to myself that no one should be given surprise parties after the age of, say, 45, as they might very well prove fatal) and had the magical privilege of meeting Ms. Mara, F2F; concerning which I will say only that five hours seemed a very short time to spend together, after the last five years, and I hope that—that—yes. Basically I was able to negotiate our parting (inside myself) by reminding my bones that we’re going to know each other the rest of our lives. And that I really want to go to Portland in springtime and see all my girls there.

Also? it was a big birthday with a Lot of People and I got really quickly overwhelmed, especially by the many Small People running around shrieking happily post-birthday-cake. And I was grateful Ms. M. was there so we could huddle in a corner and exchange shorthand intelligences in our reassuringly introverted literary fashion.

(Backstory: the neighbor and I had recently had a fight or sequence of disagreements I can only describe as “riproaring,” w/r/t social justice which seems to be our chief topic of disagreement, whether it’s race, gender, or sexual preference; and I cleverly thought I had solved the problem by saying, Well let’s just don’t talk about those things! let’s just eat and drink and be merry! but my saying so in fact inadvertently offended him TO THE CORE, as in his response was along the lines of, What am I, just meat to you, what if I actually LIKE talking to you about these things, forget it, let’s just stop seeing each other; and I was baffled completely that my adroit compromise had so wounded him, because holy God what is this, you don’t just want to fuck, you want to talk? about social justice? which, perhaps I may be forgiven for misunderstanding that this was what he and I were all about; but in fact I was mistaken; and we wound up having a long conversation in which we even talked about PREGNANCY (I sat there trembling from the unexpected seriousness of it) and then made up with flagrant sex, which, sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the point of fighting, just so you can make like bonobos afterward; but anyway. All this was the inner backdrop of my trip to Dallas, and the cause of my sitting there wonderingly watching Small People run around and shriek, and thinking: Could I really have one of those? Because a) I am so ancient I would be way past being officially a Geriatric Mother, if I could even conceive without help which is statistically impossible, and b) I have no money and is that really fair to a sprog, to bring it into a life with no money whatsoever, and c) why the fuck did this completely natural urge to procreate not strike me a decade ago, and d) what have I done with my life. Leading me unsurprisingly to:)

Then I said goodbye to everyone and drove to my parents’ farm and on the drive, like, as in, the second I got into the car and was alone, had a complete sobbing meltdown out of nowhere, which lasted the length of the drive. And from North Dallas to my parents’ farm is a long dark drive. Really long when it’s 9 pm and you’re crying hysterically the whole way down I-45 because you’ve wasted your life.

Content of said meltdown being some uncanny intersection of 1) Texas Texas Texas, I’m still driving the same highways and farm-to-market roads I drove at 17 and 25 and 30 and now I’m 42 and what the hell, what the hell, will I still be turning off FM 1126 and down this pale gravel road in the dark when I’m 60, yes, very likely, oh God, What Have I Done with My Life, and 2) What Have I Done with My Life w/r/t, I’ve been writing poems assiduously all this time and only have enough for a 48-page manuscript maybe? Maybe. Seriously? Seriously.

Then I drove through the gate and locked it behind me, the dogs went nuts, my dad and I talked for a half-hour, my mom having already fallen asleep because she gets up at 5 to do the milking, and I too fell into bed as if poleaxed and slept from 11 pm until 10 am, eleven hours, and woke feeling, thank God, merely dully meltdowny as opposed to acutely screamy meltdowny. And I hung out with my mom and her three black cats and we did chores and then I randomly wound up teaching her how to poach an egg, a skill I perfected February of last year, when emerging from the worst of the breakup. We ate brown farm eggs still warm from the hen, with rounds of Italian-bread toast she’d made herself. She makes everything. It’s kind of hilarious, as in, what happens when a six-figure executive retires and can’t just relax, she has to start a home dairy and bake her own bread and sell homemade cheese etc. I mean these are serious cheeses, dipped in red wax and aged in a little cave-like fridge and everything. She loaded me up and—

—and then I drove home, or anyway to Houston. I listened to a lot of This American Life so I wouldn’t go back into screamy sobby meltdown place. That was successful. The one about the house at Loon Lake was particularly haunting. The mysterious heartbreaking letter, written by a woman alone in the hospital with her newly born illegitimate baby, begging the father to come see them—

My parents had furtively distributed startlingly large deposits of cash throughout my belongings (e.g. inside the cute little twenty-year-old dorm microwave my dad gave me). I think they didn’t each know the other was doing it, so it was twice as much as they probably meant to donate. I feel kind of guilty about it, and like I should open a new savings account, but my mom stipulated that I should use some of it to get the house cleaned—though now that I’ve coated my floor with olive oil it is actually a good deal cleaner than it’s been in months, and honestly I want to buy this:

After three hours and another tank of gas, I walked into the front door of the carriage house to find the neighbor finishing A Handmaid’s Tale, which I had lent him, and my cat curled up on the rug at his feet. They both looked up at me serenely, with their individual kinds of affection. I didn’t know whom to kiss first. Did I go for the cat? Probably. I think so.

Then a week of school happened and it ate me alive and so I didn’t have time to worry so much about how my aesthetic mode is all wrong Wrong WRONG and I will never be a great Blakean poet or even a decent minor American one etc. The truth of this graphic became deeply apparent as I realized 1) I can’t take any more weekends off between now and May 1, I don’t know how I’m going to handle AWP, and 2) whenever I get on top of my own coursework, the classes I teach suffer terribly; and whenever I address that, I don’t have mental space to write. (For “adequate clinical skills,” read “poems that don’t suck sweaty balls.”)

And now it is the weekend and once again the weekend holds out its beckoning shiny fish-lure of: you can get caught up! You can get Ahead! You can get it all done, and arrive on the other side ready for Monday with a clean scrubbed face and folded laundry and essays all printed out and read and neatly marked upon and all the students’ Blackboard posts graded!

But this is not true. Because there is a dance party tonight, at which I must appear even though I am bleeding R-rated style, not even PG-13, and there is beer to be drunk and sex to be had and sleep to be slept and olive oil to be mopped and friends to be talked with, and that brings me to another thing.

February. February is hard on ALL my girls. Seriously, this week I’ve heard from like five beloveds who are all, um, don’t mean to be alarmist but my ship is SINKING over here. And I know this to be true about February. I don’t know what it is. It’s just that kind of month. It’s the kind of month where if you can’t bring yourself to ask for emotional support you’re going to wind up being search-and-rescued off Atalaya, having left a trail of blue barbituates and empty brandy bottles behind you. (Alliteration apologies.) And it feels good to be useful, if I am being useful, even if all I can do is say: tell me all about it. The miracle is that it is February and I am not, for the first time in years, for reasons I don’t fully understand, not suffering. I’m not even on meds and I’m okay. I’m deeply okay, despite a small projectile-weeping-in-the-car outburst about my upcoming birthday and my not-upcoming non-book publication. I’m not wracked by the crazy.

I don’t know why but I wake up mornings saying to someone, somewhere, thank you. Thank you for not smiting me this February. Thank you for the sun and the cat and the duvet and the x hours of sleep I just had. And thank you that I don’t wake up, or mostly don’t wake up, in states of anxiety and grief. More often than not I become conscious and just feel relief that becoming conscious doesn’t equal being in pain.

Except those mornings when it does.

So Sunday night after I got back there was, I can’t remember, various things which probably involved sex, because that’s how that is, but at some point the neighbor and I decided to watch Blue Valentine, which I had forbidden myself from watching when it first came out because I knew it was about a long-term-relationship breakup and I (correctly) surmised I wouldn’t be able to handle that in any way whatsoever.

And as suspected the film was completely harrowing, at a couple of points I had to put the Virgin of Guadalupe pillow over my face, aghast, Gosling and Williams are both I think fairly accurate in their depiction of what starts to happen when long-term relationships go all Tar Baby like that: when you literally can’t say anything that doesn’t wound the other person to the quick, and you’re alarmed and you try to make it right but in trying to fix it you say something worse, etc. And you can’t imagine leaving and you can’t imagine staying in a situation which is growing more acutely painful almost by the minute. I refer to this mental state affectionately as “having fallen in the ground glass,” (cf. olive oil), because when you try to get up you have to put your palms down in it and getting out is going to hurt just as much as or more than staying in. Like that.

Also of course it reminded me scene after scene of my divorce, about which I am coming to have a strange new understanding, a kind of post-awareness (perhaps?) beyond the simplistic “it was all my fault” (my default stance for a long time) or “it was his fault” (a defensive stance when it became too devastating to continue believing it was my fault and thinking I should kill myself because of it), a non-understanding understanding of the divorce which is something like, just, ugh, augh, pain happens to people and we mangle through it the best we can and, honestly? I really no longer have any idea what happened, any story which I can distill and to which I can refer handily. The neighbor asked me a few months ago and to my surprise I discovered I no longer had a pat small-talk party answer. I just remember, poorly, imperfectly, that my husband became increasingly unhappy, and quit working, and was really upset about that, he seemed very depressed and unable to get help for it, and also he seemed to indicate fairly regularly that I was at least partly responsible for everything, and but nothing I could do or say seemed to make it better, even when I kept a journal detailing the different strategies I would try so that I would not repeat them but would try new more helpful ones, and quite quickly I began to feel resentful about the limits imposed by his unhappiness, that we couldn’t go out or see people, and I pleaded/insisted that we try therapy, that whole covert dishonest get-him-into-therapy-secretly trick, and so we did therapy for about a year and a half with someone who was almost completely unhelpful, during which time I deluded myself that I was not detaching from the relationship when I very obviously was. A detachment which ended with my hooking up one night with a twenty-something Zen monk and thus beginning the disastrous process (but perhaps a necessary one? I don’t know) of setting my entire life on fire. From 2003 until 2006 there was nothing but flames. And climbing up a mountain in the snow hoping I would just pass out and die, and cursing up at the moon, yelling at god o’clock in the morning you could have helped me you know, you might have made it just a little bit easier for me to do this business of staying alive.

So anyway all that was happening for me during Blue Valentine.

And at the same time, my friend was having his own reaction to the film, which reaction seemed to be something along the lines of: good-hearted men are forever trying to save relationships and women don’t care, cannot be trusted, are heartless and cruel and disloyal, abandon you at the drop of a hat, and that is why I don’t try to have long-term relationships with your kind anymore, because y’all are jerks. And what about their little girl. [Paraphrase mine.] And admittedly I believe the film lends itself willingly to this interpretation because we do see Ryan Gosling again and again reaching out, saying let’s stay together, let’s work through this, I still love you. Which the Michelle Williams character seems unwilling to do, though we don’t know what events have happened that have made her unwilling; and maybe she never really wanted to get married in the first place. Also, though, I think the Gosling character’s behavior says something else (showing up at her place of work drunk and aggressive, cursing at her with real malice when she forgot to close the gate and the dog was run over and she’s already obviously visibly upset). He’s actually as conflicted and ambivalent, I suspect, as she is; but in every breakup, things polarize and someone is always Jungianly tasked with being the Breaker-Upper versus the Hanger-Onner, and he’s stuck with the latter job (which is actually a nice shift from movies where it’s always the guy who’s itching to cut and run). And Nietzsche claims, and I’m sure the neighbor would agree, that it’s men who are sentimental and romantic, whereas women are heartless and calculating (or were in nineteenth-century Germany, anyway, when they couldn’t vote or own property or make decisions about their own lives other than who they might be able to entrap into marrying them. Oh, Fritz).

So anyway, I just, we just had really different readings of the film (kind of like this couple, actually). Mine was: people don’t want to hurt each other, we don’t want to feel pain, we want to live together and love each other and be happy, but and also people often act like assholes, unhappily, against our very wishes (vis-à-vis the film’s theme song, “You Always Hurt the One You Love“). Whereas my friend’s reading of the film seemed to be, men are nice and women are evil and cannot be trusted ever. Which he stated in various ways at various times during the film with what sounded like a great deal of conviction.

I went to bed upset, and woke up with my stomach churning. There I’d been lying in the neighbor’s arms for two hours, his body wrapped around mine, our cheeks together, his lips murmuring into my hair what foul traitoresses are my kind. What. What. I thrashed in the bedclothes, gulped; thought about cancelling class; realized this was not the way to start off February. Immediately texted the only girlfriend I have on the ground here, the lovely Russian/New Yorker poet Ms. O. “Help,” I said, simply. “Help.”

(Also, I’d had three sweaty nightmares in a row: having to get a cocktail-waitressing job by sucking up to a sexist and being terrified that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the work; going downhill on a bicycle with no pedals and no handlebars and having to brake by dragging my feet on the asphalt; and a dream where the Fruitbat and I were at a Buddhist retreat with a lot of famous Buddhists and she was ignoring me and hanging out with all her cool friends.)

O. cancelled her office hour at 1 pm and met me outside for tea. A cold golden day on a sunny bench, my hands clenched around a cup of blueberry green tea, rattled to the bones. Ms. O. was serious and wise and straightforward:

“It sounds like you guys are having a relationship.”

“No! No, we’re not! I mean, we’ve talked about it, and we like each other a lot, but this is not a long-term thing. We’re clear on that.”

She surveyed me coolly. “Define long-term.”

I looked down and sighed. We’ve been seeing each other about six months already, is her point.

“But….”

“If you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t care what he thought. He doesn’t hate women, he’s been hurt. You’ve been hurt too. You both have issues.” She put a lot of emphasis on “both.”

“But I don’t sit there saying all men suck and can’t be trusted!”

O. shrugged beautifully, gazed away for a moment, then back at me.

“You say other things.”

I sit there trying to think what those things might be. The hurtful things I might do or say without knowing about it, because he like me doesn’t want to bring them up. Ms. O reads my thoughts:

“Do you ever spend the night at his place?”

“No.”

“…”

“I mean, I try, but I can’t sleep. I always wake up in the middle of the night and have to go home.”

“Do you think that hurts him?”

“I…I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Because the point is really that when he said those things it hurt you. It hurt you because you like him. And you need to tell him that it hurts you. But don’t turn it into some argument about feminist theory. You’re always intellectualizing because that’s easier than talking about your feelings.”

More clutching of blueberry tea. How did she get so sage? Goddammit. And beautiful, did I mention she’s beautiful? So much so that actually sometimes I’m afraid I just stare at her unmanneredly, like an ugly American.

“I’m scared to say anything. What if he reacts by getting angry and defensive?”

“Well, he might. But you can’t do anything about that. Just keep it simple: What you said hurt me. You can’t let this relationship make you depressed. You can’t run that risk, with your past. So let him know. He doesn’t want to hurt you.”

And so now it’s Saturday somehow and I still haven’t been able to say anything, partly because the week has been so insane but mostly because we’ve had this deeply physically affectionate connection and I feel protective of it and honestly kind of moony about him and don’t want to rock the boat by saying “what you said a week ago hurt me and it took me 24 hours even to realize it and a week to say anything” and I know it’s probably really silly that I’m scared to bring it up, but I’m enjoying the closeness and companionship and affection and oh shit it’s reaching that point isn’t it, I’m going to be hurt again when he goes, and they always leave, and we sat up talking until 1 am about Gödel and Fermat and Haskell and Python and Toxoplasma gondii and I don’t know what all, and only stopped talking because I was nodding out thanks to sodium naproxyn as he was telling me something about fourth-dimensional energy something or another, and every night we watch another episode of The Book Group, to which he introduced me and OMG I am seriously obsessed with it so we are rationing because there are only 12 episodes in total, and he makes me cups of Thai Delight tea with vanilla soymilk and he makes me Szechuan chicken and he asks if I want a backrub which of course turns into torrid sex all over the sofa, and really it is all very something and also not very something, it is a lot of not something, and I need to stay straight in my mind about that, however sweet and attached it gets, we have no monogamous agreement and in fact no agreement whatsoever other than we’ve been doing this for about six months and we like each other a lot, and we agree that if I accidentally got pregnant I would probably try to stay pregnant, though there would be only maybe a 40 percent chance of doing so; and he will finish his doctorate by the end of the semester or the end of the summer and move away and have a fancy job and meet his future partner and mother of his children etc. and I can just carry on here with my midlife grad-school pointlessness, writing poems that are bad and being childless and feeding my cat too many treats and throwing glass bottles of olive oil around, and just feeling grateful that I got to have one final fling before I get so many bristly gray chin hairs that I have to start—

You can see where all this keeps going.

February brain. We all have it. The point is to remember, for me, that these are just thoughts, and I can either believe them or just wave politely to them as they pass by.

And if you’re the neighbor and you’re reading this, I’m sorry that I’m a) sort of a big chicken, and b) someone who thinks better in print than she does in words, and c) that I blog about every damn thing. Occupational hazard. This is what happens when you date a girl who reads, even casually, I’m afraid. I probably never should have given you the URL but I really like you and more alarmingly to my singed cauterized heart I even am starting to trust you to try to understand the things I am always trying, forever trying, to say.

Gentle reader, it’s 12:34. Make a wish. Happy Sivvy Death-Day and please take care of yourselves. And I will try to write more coherently and less bulimically in the future. Try. Try. I will also try to write more than two poems this semester. And not to scratch the poison ivy I got at the Arboretum two weeks ago (I was so desperate for trees and water, but made the mistake of going off in the bushes to pee, which, hello, we’re in Texas, poison IVY) and there are too many other things to tell you all about so I will just stop here.

But doorknob confession/random fashion note: I bought these from sockdreams.com and I kind of have a crush on their website right now, not least because they have free shipping!!! and awesomely low-impact packaging, and the socks are the cutest thing ever.

Unfortunately I made the belated post-purchase discovery that my upper thighs are in fact a full 21″ around and not 16″ or whatever the pretty pencil-girl model’s thighs are, so these aren’t so much thigh-highs on me as they are OTK (over-the-knee) socks. But so be it, they are still hella cute and when I am not bleeding all over everything like an extra from Apocalypse Now I fully intend to wear them for this guy I seem to be sort of seeing, and perform my gender to what I hope will be effective results. </girl>

Maybe on the same day myself and Ms. A. present, in feminist theory seminar, on “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris” and “Compulsory Heterosexuality”? I hope so. I seem to have taken up residence in this capacious space between full-on cognitive dissonance and multi-variable irony; sexy socks are just part of the devil’s bargain.