Nearly Departed

You walk off the stage, taking longer than you should; then again, time is something that never quite occurs to you. It’s early May, the time just before end of school sets in, and the crowd ebbs and flows over us like sand being stirred from above. The sun dips behind a cloud as I shove my fists further into my pockets, feeling around past a melted chapstick and crumpled $5 bill. As you pack your guitar into its case, looking to most like you’re tying your shoes, my feet make a beeline toward you—tugged by an invisible thread over some long plain of silence that breaks open in threes: one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three hold. Suddenly, color gets sucked from the sky. I forget how to be. Late afternoon on a lawn full of teenagers, waiting for one of them to call out your name—or mine—one of us, anyone, just so the other will know what sound to mold our mouths around. I’ll stand in the parking lot afterward, hoping to catch a glimpse of your back as it ducks into a car, something to ground the wave—the almost impossible knowingness—of having already held your face in my hands. “Fauxstalgia,” a friend later calls it; or the feeling of fact, of intense reverie, over an experience you haven’t yet had. What he forgets to mention, however, is the way this truth pounds in the chest. The unfurling that occurs, like a flower that turns toward the sun.

       There are stages to every story.
It was broken down for me, once, like a table of elements: Boy meets girl. (Girl frets about hair, boy hugs girl from behind.) Boy loses girl. (Girl cries into hair, boy stares longingly into faraway ocean.) Boy gets girl. (Girl gets grip.)
Life goes on.
I let this wash over me as I sat with my back against the water, skin crisping in the midday sun like a leaf held under a magnifying glass. Two blonde women approached from the opposite trail, and I knew at least one would feel obligated to stop and tell me, like she was delivering some indispensible truth, that I’d need to wear sunscreen. I’d thank her, smiling so my lazy eye doesn’t crinkle, in that way I always do when I’m still in control. Sure enough, they stopped—matching pink Nikes glaring up from the concrete—and the shorter one leaned in so her breath caught the wind. “Careful,” she said. “You’re really burning up.”
     “Thank you,” I blinked at her, marveling at how many people go out of their way to tell me this. Like my fair skin is a revelation, something that only they see; as though by alerting me, they’ve done their good deed. Like I can’t feel the sting on my face. Like I don’t know my own transparency.
      Meet, lose, get, I wrote again and again, circling the middle word like a fish in a gaping whale mouth. It’s the course of every good sitcom, every meaningful romantic comedy. What’s not lost cannot ever be appreciated. Still, the words oozed like a drone onto the page, and I wondered why my dad said that what’s yours never leaves you: because most things of love do, at some point, evaporate. They were never really yours, he’d argue. Right. But the thing is, I never meant to own them. I only wanted something to fill in the blank for each memory made, or made up, or whatever: to be hit in the heart from the right type of drum, because frequencies cure. Just someone to wait for at a stoplight.


I’m walking with hay sticking out of my sandals, hay pushing in from the toe and up under my arches, dirty with campfire ash and silty mud. High noon, and the late winds of summer play games with my hair; the bare field ahead opens up like a yawn, heat streaming out of its mouth. Sweat drips off the end of my nose, and I’m aware of your presence nearby. I don’t know that it’s you, exactly, or that you’re even here; but if asked, I’d say that my skin is on fire. I swim past the row of vehicles that scream back the cloudless sky, feeling the gaze of children who have not yet un-believed what they sense bursting out of my body. I see you emerge from behind a partition, a full head taller than the boy in the Thin Lizzy shirt, and feel like I’ve swallowed an apple. I can read the hours you’ve spent in the sun from the shape of your skin, like rings in a tree. Your head’s to the left, laughing at something Thin Lizzy has said, and I somehow forget to forget: suddenly, I’m left only with you, with the moment before you turn your head, and the sensation of skin beneath fabric. Thin, like a sheet. A blue dress in early August. I wonder if your smile matches your steps, and it could have been hours. Then again, we both know how heat plays games with the body.

       I put down my pen, coming back to the park and the river; my back against the water, earthy smell pouring out from the trees. Each time someone ran by, my hand snapped to my hip, to the place where my phone wasn’t buzzing—no more than it was five minutes before, and five minutes before that—halfheartedly searching each jogger’s vibration for some sort of message, or truth. I pulled the phone out from my pocket and stared at it, scowling. It stared on, feeling nothing. You pathetic fuck, it said. How did you come to be owned by my face?
Earlier that morning, in front of an online yoga class, I pulled socks over my hands to keep them from slipping. A pupil-less woman in tight pants and ponytail laughed as her leg bent back over her head. “Don’t worry if you fall out,” she told me. “I fall out all the time.” Lies! My calves began their violent shake, and I plopped to my knees. This bitch wasn’t fooling me. “Whew! I know I’m certainly feeling it.” You don’t feel anything, you stupid robot! I pulled myself onto my belly, forehead flat against the tile floor. “Find the place where you’re about to fall over,” she twittered, “and hold it there.”
“Hold.
Hold.
Hold.”

With my head on the floor like that, I thought that I felt my phone buzz.

It hadn’t.


The third time we meet, it is from behind. Your shirt smells like cigarettes, and I know that my window is closing. Before you turn around, I place my hands up to my wooly hat, then move them down over my eyes. This is my face. This is my collarbone, my shoulders, my chest. My stomach, my pelvis, my knees. This is my hand. I am see-through. From your back, I can feel you surrender. My lips on your ear. I lose track of my life and would drive the car, drunkenly, and a dozen more things that refuse to make sense; but somehow, you hear me and smile. Cards drop out of my wallet, and I force myself to notice: to remember that I’ve already eaten dinner, that I don’t really like beer. But certain things wobble and fade when your hand lifts my hair from my neck.


       The breeze came up over the water, exhaling across my notebook with a definitive huff. I traced my fingers along the coarse pages, outlining words, starved for the feeling beneath them. A butterfly drifted by, lazily matching the wind with its attitude, and I wondered if bugs can feel loss. What if it missed its chrysalis? Did anyone ask if it wanted to change?
Clearly dehydrated, still stalking my phone, I pulled myself up from the rock. On my way to the drinking fountain, I remembered a friend who believed she was being followed by butterflies. “My girlfriend died in a traumatic way,” she told me, bopping the pedestrian signal with her thumb as we waited to walk. “And the energy felt clogged. I could feel her around, like she hadn’t crossed over.
“But when I started seeing butterflies, I knew it had happened. She had left. It changed.”
With my head dipped down to the fountain, I thought of my own little ghosts. When somebody’s home is a shrine to a breakup, photos of the recently evanesced looking down from each surface that sticks to her face, eyes following me as I wade through the space left behind. The nights that I drive home from work and a song hits the radio, packed with the outline of someone I’ve tried to forget. My house isn’t haunted, I’m sure…but those stop signs? They’re brutal. I cry for our unfinished business each time that I brake.


This time, our meeting is the sum of three parts: One, a bus with a low overhang. I smack my head as I duck into my seat, and sitting with my knees curled into my chest, spin soft words of comfort inside. Two, a porch and a man eating a turkey sandwich. He offers one bite for a dollar, my eyes drooling over the bread, but I decline. Three, a swarm of people with paper cups in their hands; recognizing a girl from the bus, smiling, then remembering how I’d hit my head. Disappearing, embarrassed.

Body, blood, spirit.

I finally see you from across the room, white hat hovering above a mountain of sweaty curls, and dip my head down to find lipstick. Reemerging, I fold through the crowd, moving forward and to you like an electric current, like a pulse. That familiar draw. You tumble back from me, clutching your heart with your hand; and I know, suddenly, that I’ll fall. I’ll fall even though I designed this room, imagined it with all my heart, picked the wallpaper and dotted the carpet with flowers and placed myself in it, all of me, with a jeweled star in my hair and shoes that stay soft when I walk. When I dance.  

In the alley behind the bar, we look at and through one another, gingerly tossing each word in to see if it sinks. You ask for a lighter, I think you say ladder. You walk away, and a man pushes past. You here alone? He asks. Yes, I reply. Oh, he says, raking his hands through his hair. You don’t look like the kind of girl who comes here alone.

But I did. I come here alone every time, rifling through circumstances, searching. And I remember, when I see you: your cycles, your glue. This is what it feels like to have missed someone for a long, long time.

You return, but your eyes stay focused on the person just behind my left ear. I know that my window is closing again, that glorious in-between granting a moment of touch, and I pull my chin up to your shoulder. A sloppy kiss, then I float away: feet moving aimlessly, knowing only that it’s time to go. I’m sure that you’ll speak, so I stare straight ahead—but suddenly, sense your retreat. It’s strange how the spine recognizes Alone: to contract then relax, sure only that you’ve somehow stopped watching me leave. 2 a.m. on a Sunday, 65 degrees, and I’m not too small to feel pain. What’s terrifying is to think that maybe, at some point, I’ll feel nothing.


I wiped my chin on my sleeve, finally coming up for air, watching the last of the water bubble its way down the drain. Behind me, small notes caught the air as someone noodled their way through a clarinet waltz. I began walking away, but paused when the music halted.
“You writing a book?” a voice asked.
“No,” I replied, turning around. A boy with long, stringy hair stared back at me, clarinet perched on his knee, squinting his eyes in the sun. I cleared my throat. “I’m writing a letter.”
“To someone in prison?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he sniffed, placing the instrument back in its case. “I didn’t realize people did that anymore. Write letters, that is. Other than to people in prison.”
I waited to be released, but stayed mysteriously rooted as this stranger loped toward me. Before long, we sat: tracing patterns in the dirt with our fingers as I spoke to him, and he listened, about the past lives in which I’ve met you before. I don’t know anymore, I squeaked, words jamming in my throat as I tried not to cry. I can’t tell if what I’m remembering is real or made up.
He paused, thumb making a crescent moon shape in the soil, then spoke softly. “Do you know what ‘idiosyncrasies’ are?"
Kind of, I told him. I think so.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think they’re this thing where you meet someone, and you have the feeling that you’ve met them before; but not only that, you’re remembering how you felt the last time you saw them. Only you’ve never met. But the feeling lingers, like muscle memory…and it’s like you know you’ll love them, because you always have. Because you’ve done it before.”

I remembered you, then, and the blue dress that streamed out behind me. I’ve held you in my muscles for so long, you know; I can’t help that you’ve haunted my bones. Breathe through them like air; let me float in the knowingness, knowing your bones. Sifting through all our lifetimes like sand.

“Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. People were just wrong.”
We sat for a long time, neither one speaking, watching the sun fall behind the water. “What is it?” he asked finally, drawing his hands up into his sleeves.
I want, I told him. And it played like a tape in my heart.

I want, I want, I want, I want, I want. 

      He leapt up, suddenly, wrapping me in his thin arms like a bird. I breathed in his smell as we hugged, but nothing stuck. “I see you,” he said, smiling crookedly as I pulled back. He furrowed his brow. “Are you going to write a book?”
“Yes,” I decided. “Maybe.”
“Well,” he said, brushing off his knees as he stood. “It’s going to be good. Maybe.”

~

I made my way down the hill, past the ducks treading circles in water, past the women in sneakers and babies with soft heads and gums. What happens to all the wishes I’ve hurled toward you? Are they stored until next time, preserved under snow? I think of it, still, when I pick up a dandelion. My mouth makes a wish before I try to explain; and sometimes, it even comes true. Other times, I wash away the small superstitions that tether me to your shape, and I live. Maybe this time around, you will see your own shadow. This time around, maybe one will stop drifting away.

     In the end, though, I’m not worried. We’ve done this before. And if asked, I would do it again.

This in No Way Revolves Around Miley Cyrus

Dear Indy,

I wish to speak to you on a subject of the utmost importance. It is topical. It involves our sweet, aching planet—our less sweet, but equally pained, government—the community of Santa Barbara, and (eek!) even Lucidity Festival; it is at once creative, political, philosophical, and personal. It involves each of us, equally, interchangeably, together.

Flash mobs.

And before you throw this paper down, assuming yet another theatre kid’s half-baked plea for attention (“Give me a location! Seriously, just give me a location, watch what I can do with the first ten lines of Macbeth!”), allow me to explain: this is not your average theatre. This phenomenon resists definition, slipping through the cracks of propriety, threatening to disrupt everything you think you know about performance. The flash mobs are coming, Santa Barbara, and they just might save us all.

I know what you’re thinking: “Flash mob! That thing where everyone shows up in identical costumes, perfectly coiffed, to perform polished choreography while a crowd of onlookers gawk in simultaneous jealousy and awe! Right?”

Wrong. I know that world; that world was my world, the family of dancers and directors who shellacked me into believing that my life’s ambition could be whittled down to whether my name made the top of the Nutcracker cast list. Don’t get me wrong: I am grateful for the discipline this instilled. However, when it came down to it, my question to the girl in the mirror—perfectly poised, one speck in a sea of bunheads—was never, How am I pushing my artistic boundaries? But rather, Am I wearing the right leotard?

Flash mob, on the other hand, occurs when a group of all shapes, sizes, abilities, and backgrounds comes together for the sole purpose of creating a strange scene in a public space. It raises questions: for example, What happens when the boundary between performer and audience member is blurred? What happens when there is no ideal body type, no expected aesthetic? What happens when the performance space can’t be controlled? Just last week, at Lucidity Festival’s “Rising Vibes for the Universe” event at the Arlington, I participated in two flash mobs: one Bollywood, one Michael Jackson. For the former, we rehearsed for a few weeks, carefully orchestrating the spontaneity that accompanies flash mob. I’m well aware that “orchestrated spontaneity” is an oxymoron, and that we were, in fact, wearing identical costumes; however, not even our hip jingles could save us when the music failed to play at an audible volume. Only our attitudes could do that. As we plowed forward with smiles on our faces, the audience filled in the gaps—clapping hands and stomping feet to create the necessary rhythm, allowing us the opportunity to roll with the punches. That’s the gift of flash mob, after all: unpredictability, and the chance to make the best of what we’re given. Improvisation, connection. Far from alienating others, it calls upon us to carry their weight: all the while trusting that they will do the same when the time comes.

Flash mob, like love, requires a suspension of disbelief. It demands that we trust our instincts to save us when we’re handed something unexpected. For example, if a flash mob is announced mere hours before the performance—giving nothing but the instruction to show up and wear green—guess what? You show up and wear green. If you know the choreography, the skit, or the intention beforehand, excellent: but if not, you’re still wearing green. If an elbow gets thrown in your face, you use it as a prop. You laugh. And best of all, you’re granted permission to apply these lessons to other areas of life: for instance, one can’t help but believe that the current political situation would lighten if a crowd of mismatched dancers entered the White House, singing and dancing to a chorus of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” Using silly art to make people uncomfortable doesn’t always disrupt unhealthy stalemates. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

When we’re invited to question the boundary between performer and audience member—unsure of who is “in on the secret”—we unlock a whole host of other possibilities. Forget questions of wearing the right leotard; performance is demystified, and separateness itself is revealed as a construct. Suddenly we’re all players, and are handed a truth that we—that’s right, Santa Barbara, us especially—are in desperate need of learning: how to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously. It’s happening already, and I know you can smell it. Art projects are oozing outward, the Funk Zone gets cooler by the minute, and on a nationwide level—hell, on a worldwide level—people are beginning to question everything. We’re less and less content with the idea of a heavy velvet curtain obscuring us from what takes place in the wings. We want to see the stage sweepers. We want in on the mess.

Here in Santa Barbara, we don’t usually like messes. We like our days seventy degrees and sunny, our commutes fifteen minutes or less, and our performances clean. However, “clean” doesn’t cut it anymore; and flash mobs, in all their nitty gritty, are inclusive and egalitarian in a world that tends to be neither. Without trying, they simply are: revolutionary.

I recently approached a group of high school students about performing in a flash mob; and by default, they flipped their hair and averted eye contact, behaving as though I’d just asked them to wear a coat of tarantulas. But the seed was planted. Fast forward two short months, and those same students will be joining us for our “Thriller” flash mob at the Sunken Gardens: on October 26, we will all participate in a worldwide effort called “Thrill the World,” pretending to be zombies in order to raise funds for charity. And you know what? These students, along with hundreds of others from all walks of life, are setting the tone for the type of person they will be: one who expects art to exist everywhere, who lives in the moment, accepts all bodies, and has fun.

As Howard Thurman says, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that.” Even if what makes you come alive is, ironically, dressing like a zombie and pretending to be undead, go out and do it: “What the world needs is people who have come alive,” and people who have come alive need more flash mobs. So. The next time you see one, I hereby invite you to partake in the madness: clap your hands and go there. Love the improvisational art in your community. Join in. Let go. Believe. And who knows… the spirit you save just may be your own.

Sincerely,

Jenna Tico

Terrible Twos, or: How a Toddler Taught Me to Stop Regretting and Love the Life

1. Someone once told me that we die the way we live; i.e. if you spat through life with the courtesy of a groundhog, digging shit up, you can expect the same gracelessness from death. And a sweet life begets a happy ending. I'm not sure if I buy it entirely... it seems to me that the only 'rule' in death is the fact of it. However, I do know that--without fail--Benji will wake up the way he falls asleep; if he goes down screaming, he'll get up screaming. Every time. Likewise, if he sinks to the mattress with his face an inch away from mine--legs and arms wrapped around my torso in total surrender, blinking a little longer each time until his eyelids eventually droop to a close--it is the same way he will emerge: smiling lopsidedly, shuffling his way back from whatever dream just came.

Most mornings he resembles a Muppet. A geyser of hair at the back of his neck, sleep running in snail trails down his pillow-pocked cheek, a soft cotton T-shirt bunched up around his bellybutton. I walk to meet him, usually in my own version of sleep-dilapidation, and do a brief assessment: is it gonna be a good day? Sometimes he hugs me around the waist, other times he smacks me in the kneecaps. In any case, the Muppet waddles past me down the stairs and begins his morning sonata:

"I wan ceeweal."

There are no exceptions to this rule. In life as in death, and in Benji, we come out the way we went in: wanting cereal. Maybe grumpy, maybe smiling, but with surprisingly little ailment that a fresh bowl of Rice Chex can't cure.

2. The great thing about toddlers is, like dogs, they don't hold a grudge. If Benji and I have a rough morning, or if GOD FORBID we run out of cereal, I can guarantee he will have forgotten about it by the time I pick him up from preschool. If you throw a dog out on the porch because she has eaten your socks, or if you lose your temper with a 2-year-old because--guess what?--he tried to eat your socks, there is usually a twenty-minute turnaround before he is ready to love you all over again. When I walk to meet Benji at 3:30, the baby strapped to my chest and a string cheese sticking out of my shorts pocket, the morning's events are irrelevant. I search the porch of half-pints for the one face that knows me back, for those Bambi eyes and curly head, until I find it; and when he runs out to greet me--little hands outstretched--and pours himself into my hug, it doesn't matter what happened at breakfast. Grievance is a myth. We are always, always forgiven.

3. I wonder what Jimmy Choo was like as a child. Did he try on his mother's slippers, picking at the bits of fabric and lace until he knew--yes, I want to spend my life's work making horrendously beautiful women's shoes?

If so, he ain't got nothing on Benji.

Shoes are his favorite, but fashion is his thing: and as for many, the source of great joy and deep frustration. We've all had those mornings when you're late for school and nothing looks good. You try on seven dresses, only to leave the house in the same jeans and t-shirt that you put on when you woke up. For Benji, this is compounded with the toddler mantra of DO IT MYSELF. It doesn't matter if his buttons resemble a Rubik's cube, or if he feels the need to wear a woolen sweater when it's ninety degrees outside: no matter what he chooses--and believe me, he will choose it--he insists on putting on himself. Getting dressed can take anywhere from five minutes to two hours; but like most things with a child, you don't get to hit Scene Selection. You wait it out.

One morning at the beginning of our time together, we were on our way to catch the bus. Benji, feeling the need to change his shoes three times, sat on the floor picking at the velcro. Benji, we have to leave.

"NO!"

Benji, we have to go. We're going to be late.

"NO!"

Benji, we seriously need to leave... I'm sorry, but I am going to help you get dressed.

"NO!"

At which point he tore off his shoes, the rest of his clothing, and tried to bite my arm. With the baby in one hand and our overstuffed diaper bag in the other, I came to a crossroads: get the child dressed and out the door through sheer force, or abandon the plan altogether. Instead, I plopped down on the floor and began to bawl.

Boy, did that ever scare him.

"Jenna okay? Jenna okay? Jenna crying."

Yes, Benji, I'm crying.

"Jenna crying."

Yes, Benji. 

We sat there for a long time, curled into each other's arms, discussing the fact that everyone cries. He played with his toes, looking up at me ever so often just to check if I had started up again; the sheer novelty of it, if nothing else, had him transfixed. I looked down and him and was wracked with guilt. We all need our mommies sometimes, Benji, and right now my mommy needs me. And I'm scared.

"Jenna crying."

No, not anymore. 

He looked at me and smiled. We got up hand in hand, and started to pick at the tornado of clothes on the floor; I grabbed his pants and t-shirt, and in one final valiant attempt, began to squeeze it over his head--

"DO IT MYSEEEEELLF!"

Of course.

But one way or another, eventually, he did.

4. The gift of letting a toddler 'do it himself,' unless you're trying to get somewhere in a hurry, is witnessing the genuine rapture of accomplishment. Doesn't matter if he pees in the toilet, drinks water out of a cup, walks down the stairs without falling, or pours a decapitated Barbie doll a cup of imaginary tea (all true): completing an action, any action, puts him on top of the world. Our walks to and from preschool are peppered with choruses of "I DIIIDDDD IITTTTT!"…which throws some perspective on how the rest of us approach household tasks. Today, while making toaster waffles, I gave it a try. The handle stayed down on the first attempt, and the waffles emerged in the most goldeny-brown way.

"I did it!!!!!"

The cats looked up at me, judging. But I was far too busy eating waffles to notice.

5. No matter the owie, no matter how big, a kiss will make it better.

6. At some point this summer, I surrendered basic hygiene. Last weekend at Beloved, I curled up inside a hoodie of my own stench--caked to perfection, of course, with the sweat of dozens of other dancers and a thin layer of Oregon mud--to sleep in the middle of the woods. There were showers available, but for $8 a pop... and at this point, I'm more than accustomed to disgust.

Before Benji enrolled in preschool, it was a miracle if I got to brush my teeth in the morning; let alone shower, or do something to my hair to make it resemble anything other than roadkill. Now that he's gone in the mornings, I may get the chance to hop in the shower--but I never expect the clean to last longer than an hour or two. With babies, spitup happens. Often more than once in the space of five minutes. Creamed carrots happen, close-range urinations happen, and applesauce explosions happen... usually when you are on your way out the door. I've given up on the idea of cleanliness because other things matter more. One afternoon as I lay comatose on my bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating which future-building career nonsense I wanted to procrastinate on first, Benji did a nosedive onto my stomach.

OOF.

He hauled himself onto my torso, planting one knee on either side, and grinned the biggest grin that has ever been grinned.

"Jenna, I  LOVE you."

And happiness swam through my body like electricity. There is no feeling like it. None.

Benji, I love you so much. You're my best boy.

At which point Benji's smile cracked open, his eyes lit up, and he delivered a stream of saliva directly into my open mouth. I leapt up, running to the bathroom in a futile attempt at disinfection; knowing all the while that if I had to choose between a clean mouth and hearing someone say he loves me--his crinkly eyes revealing that he really, truly, loves me--I'd choose the latter. Every time.

7. Have you ever heard "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round? How about the lesser-known verses, like the mommies on the bus (shh shh shh)  and the money on the bus (clink clink clink) and the horn on the bus (beep beep beep)? Have you ever heard it more than once in the same day? How about twenty-seven times?

I have.

8. If I've learned anything from my proximity to Montessori, it's that two-year-olds hate to be uprooted. They get off on their sense of order; the pink spoon goes in the pink spoon spot, we wash our hands after we use the potty, we hold hands when we cross the street. So what happens when you uproot a toddler not one, not two, but three times over the course of one summer?

In a word: poop. When the world as they know it appears to be crashing down, when they can't get a grip on where or when they are supposed to sleep, some kids take to exercising autonomy over the one thing they can control--their bowels. And by some kids, I mean Benji.

All in all, he's done incredibly well. We went from a madhouse in the Southeast to a family den in Alberta to our current home in Sellwood, and of all that backing and forthing, there was only one incident where he felt the need to smear feces on the shower curtain. What started out as sheer disgust from me, though, has morphed into sympathy; what would I do, for example, if I were in his miniature shoes? What did I do when I was just a little bit older than he was, packing up my blue suitcase twice a week to volley back and forth between my parents?

I remember sitting in the counselor's office at Roosevelt Elementary, mandatory penance for any kid dealing with Divorce. Divorce. It had such a dull clang to it, even then; but all I really remember feeling was annoyance at the counselor's inability to anticipate my game preference. I mean, Checkers? Really? I was five. She could have at least invested in some Disney gear. But instead, we bookended each other once a week--the counselor and I--around a checkerboard and a state-funded program, neither one adequately stacked to handle what might unfold between us.

Since then, I've continued to uproot. The whole time I was traveling, people asked me if I missed my own bed; and sure, I did. I missed the idea. But the truth is, I haven't had the feeling of my 'own bed,' or the comfort it supposedly contains, for many years. And even then, I had a suspicion that home was something you create. It's not a mattress.

So. One sticky July evening, we took Benji out for ice cream. After waiting in line for nearly an hour, we settled at a table near the corner--and about five minutes in, his mom pressed too hard on the side of her cone, and it shattered. It wasn't even Benji's ice cream that got sacrificed; but somehow, in his brain, that didn't matter. Something about seeing the cone explode into dozens of sugary pieces, no longer the shape it arrived in, set off an alarm in his head. Fat tears rolled down his face, and as we cooed over his screaming--half-laughing, half-crying at the fact that he was devastated over dessert--I began to think. We all crave a sense of order. For me, it doesn't mean staying in one place; if anything, it's irregularity that I seek. But it's still a pattern. I can drink my chai in a different kitchen every two weeks, subconsciously marveling at my ability to adapt to each teapot's particularities, but you can be damn sure that it's tea I'll be drinking.

9. Shameless perk of hanging out with a toddler: access to your own personal parrot. In one day, I can get Benji to tell his father that he is a "Classy Gentleman," can ask him to say "HELLOOOOO!" to just about anyone, including the representative at Virgin America, and can trick him by rattling off tongue-twisters that he will feel the need to repeat: like Perplexing. Or Transylvania. Or Crisps.

"Pedrprexeen. Dansyrvendah. Kips."

I solemnly swear to use my powers for good and not evil. But. Let's just say... the next time the bus driver sighs audibly when I struggle to collapse the un-collapsable stroller, he's got another thing coming.

"HELLOOOO, baaathead."

10. Mid-July, I received a phone call that pulled the rug out from beneath me. I remember exactly where I was standing; pad thai sizzling on the stovetop, the exact weight of the pink dress that hung loosely from my shoulders. I remember feeling like my brain had been sunburnt; but not long afterward, realizing the control center had switched to Numb. I ate the pad thai, but my throat closed around it.

The worst part, perhaps, about caring for an addict is knowing you are powerless. Nothing you can say or do will alleviate the fact that they are at war with themselves. After I received that first phone call, I received others--all variations on a theme of hopelessness. It's a defense mechanism. It's the only way I know to move forward with my own life. 

Meanwhile, I was listening to toddler Pandora and trying to perfect the ratio of almond butter to raspberry jelly. The Numbness did my laundry, went jogging, and even spent time with friends and family; it inhabited a functioning body, kept it functioning, but did nothing to bring light into the places that hopelessness lodged.

Benji did that. His unwavering hope, his unflinching belief that every day is the BEST DAY EVER because he gets to eat CEREAL, snapped me into a place of reckless optimism. Like animals, toddlers can smell when you need extra love... and for the week that I needed him most, he enveloped me in it without asking for anything in return. (Except maybe an almond butter and jelly sandwich. Or two. Or three.)

11.  Forget what you've heard about the Terrible Twos. Nothing you've ever seen on television, no half-guilty glance at that mom in the supermarket dragging her kid by the snap on his overalls, could possibly sum up what it is actually like to deal with a toddler during peak tantrum season; that is, unless you've lived with one.

Benji, despite all his warmth and goodness, is capable of taking his voice to this guttural place--a scream so potent that you're left wondering if it's even human--that renders me inert. I freeze like a stunned chicken. Funnily enough, it's almost never rooted in anything substantial; when he actually faceplants on the sidewalk, more often than not, he shakes it off and keeps running. Brushing teeth, however, can be an all-out war.

"I WANNA BRUSH MY TEEEEEEETH!!!!!!!"

Benji, when you throw your toothbrush in the toilet, you don't get to brush your teeth.

"WANNA BRUUUSHH TEEEEEEEEEEETH."

Benji, I don't like it when you punch me in the neck.

And so it goes. This is usually the point that the baby starts to cry, inspired by the general cacophony and not one to be outdone by flying toothbrushes. Sometimes, I can smell the tantrum coming a mile away; like when we're about to cross the street and Benji gives me this look, a look that quite plainly says, "I am going to do anything and everything in my power to scare the living bejeezus out of you." At this point, he tears across the street in a flash of sandals and hair, and I am forced to pin him to the sidewalk and wrestle him into the stroller, where he proceeds to scream himself into oblivion. I usually walk around the block a few times, smiling eerily at anyone who passes by, pretending that I--like they--have no idea how this demon snuck into my stroller.

When he's done howling, however, Benji brings his hands up to his face and begins his mantra. "Takea deeep breat, caaaam down. Takea deeep breat, caaam down." Sometimes he'll do this for five minutes before needing a response.

That's right, Benji. Deep breaths.

"Big hug, Jenna."

Big hug, Benji.

I thought about it once, and realized something funny. If he's at his Terrible Twos--throwing fits in grocery stores because he's tired, or they've moved the yogurt-covered raisins, or he doesn't know what's coming next--where does that place me? I'm twenty-two years old. That's TWICE the two, 2x the terrible, 2x the need to throw tantrums at bath time. I proposed this idea to Benji once, watching dazedly as he constructed a tower of legos. What do you think about that, Benji?

"Peanutbuddur petzels."

So we're really not that different, him and I. All we ever want, all we're ever truly screaming for, are peanut butter pretzels and a long nap.


12. When you're a child, there's this delicious feeling of riding in the back of a vehicle and losing all sense of time and space. It doesn't matter where you are, or where you're going; all you know is you're getting there, and someone else is making sure you do. You can close your eyes, the sounds of the street ebbing as your consciousness does. There's no resistance in this. No wondering whether you should take out your contacts before you fall asleep, no fretting over whether you've shut down your computer or fed your fish or finished the shit that stands between you and a good night's sleep.

Benji, you've inspired me to feel joy down to my skinny skin skin. When we went to Sauvie Island, watching you run into the water--your feet galloping over one another, your skin glowing under tiny droplets of sun and sea--I felt something awaken in me, like wonder. I'm not sure I knew what that meant until now.

Or rather I did, but I had forgotten. Forgotten until I watched you eat hummus by the fistful, bits of cracker stuck in your hair, blackberries staining your cheeks and your chin. Forgotten until you ran into my lap today, wrapping your arms around my neck and pressing your nose to mine; giving me that look  that says you'll trust me forever, your accordion ribcage crumpling and expanding like it's just learning how to breathe.

When I think of leaving you, I want to collapse.


13. To walk down the street with a toddler is to know that you might end up staring at the same flower for twenty minutes, and often do.

14. Sometimes, magic happens. The more enlightened among us might see perfect timing: as things being set into motion long before they actually come to fruition, as souls making an agreement to meet when they're ready. The rest of us just feel damn lucky.

A little less than 2 years ago, I met Shakey Graves at Pitzer College. I remember walking up after his show, stupidly confident as only someone in a costume rental can be, and inviting him to a party at the Co-op. A little less than 2 weeks ago, I saw him again; this time, at a bluegrass festival. Still stupidly confident, but minus the costume, I approached. He looked at me quizzically.

"Did you by any chance invite me to a Co-op?"

As a matter of fact, I did.

Suddenly, his brows split; I did my best to appear nonchalant, but ended up tying my purse string in a quadruple knot just to have something to do with my hands. He cleared his throat. "Do you have any idea how much I thought about that night? Here's how I feel about missing that party: re-GRET. Re-GREEEEEET."

That was about the time that my legs stopped working.

But they must have started working eventually, because I remember two-stepping beneath the trees behind the Pump House. My dress bunched up around my ankles, and I sank into the realization that anything can happen. Anyone can drink a box of red wine, stare down the throat of possibility, and stomp over a mat of muddy hay; anything that can occur between two human beings having a real-live connection, will. And does. He scratched against my cheek. This is why I invited you to the Co-op party, I told him, and laughed. And he buried me into his arms.

Running away from his car that night, the light peaking over the stage in the distance, I drank in the things that only I'll know. Before I settled into sleep, however, I played the evening's reel in my head; by morning, it'd already be settled into half-dream, and I wanted to remember. If I didn't have time to anticipate it, did it really happen? If a tree falls in the forest...

The funny thing about a little bit is, you always want a little bit more. When Benji has tortilla chips, if you let him have a few before dinner, he'll boycott his burrito altogether and cling to the idea of chips: CHIPS. Suddenly he wants to eat all of them, and won't be able to think of anything else until he does. For me, it wasn't enough to kiss the sunrise with a beautiful stranger; I wanted him to be inside my head, for him to know that I know that he knows that feeling his fingers in mine was a point of no return. And yet... when I ran back into the woods that night, his song at my back, I found magic in the mystery. There is love in what is left beautifully unfinished, because that in itself can feel whole.

And that is what separates me from Benji. At times when I feel like we both just want to eat a quesadilla and listen to Raffi, I remember this: holding back, leaving room for anticipation, is something I've earned. It's something I've grown into, like my grown-up clothes.

The next day, I got a message.

"You are a real live Disney princess."

And that was enough. According to Benji, that's the best compliment there is; and lest we forget, his is the only opinion that matters.


15. The roof of my mouth has already healed from where I burned it on my pizza. I run my tongue over its slickness and understand: Our hearts have the ability to mend themselves. Isn't amazing how things fade?

Some things, however, stay with us. When I pitch my brain forward to years down the road, picturing Benji in his adult life--running, perhaps, through his own dawn-lit forest--I hope he retains what his childhood has taught me. When he sprints toward the swing set, or into my arms at the end of the school day; when he collapses into bed, blanket tucked under his arm, sleep already saturating the pillow... he has no regrets. None. He surges through life like a rocket, knowing that each day is NEW, and better than the last--how could it not be? Sure, today we got to watch The Elephant Show... but tomorrow, we'll probably do it again. And again. And again.

A beautiful night at a music festival is not the pinnacle of my young life. A highlight, sure--but not the pinnacle. This is the case in babies and in bluegrass, and is the lesson I leave the summer with: that life, if we choose to see it as so, is really only ever getting better all the time. There's always a bigger playground, better shoes, a later bedtime, more joy than we thought we were capable of feeling. Benji, he wants to grow up. He's in a hurry to get to those shoes.

As for me, I'm learning to be content where I am: sitting in the dining room in a house I don't own, cup of tea at my elbow, a baby asleep on my chest. From the other room, I can hear Benji talking to his train set. He doesn't know yet what this type of freedom feels like; the kind that comes with having suffered, felt, lived. The type I have learned as I grow. He does, however, know what it means to move from your heart: he does it every day without even trying. It's as natural to him as a swing set. Or Raffi.

And we're teaching each other, my Benji and I. Holding hands as we cross the street and into the sweetness of life.

No Vacancy

I swim in a sea of false starts and self-induced happy endings. I finish the sentence without checking the grammar. I allow myself to go there, to feel, to believe, without checking first if there is something to believe in.

1. My heart has a stomped-on feeling. It's not a bad thing in and of itself, considering the glamour often contained in confusion, or the morbid satisfaction in noticing that even your morning coffee tastes like unrequited love. It's that old, familiar sting; the tender heart, which means I'll probably end up doing something exceedingly stupid, like buy a pair of clogs. I've been flirting with a pair in the window of 'Grasshopper,' where--between pathetic sighs--I contemplate whether money actually can buy happiness, and if it does, if I should buy it in the form of caramel-colored Svens. If I had money. And if I was brave enough to enter a store for any reason other than to use the bathroom, hoping we won't be evicted when Benji squirts soap all over the floor.

This entry began as a meditation on 'types,' inspired one afternoon by a conversation with my grandma. Over a pile of clementine oranges, she recounted the tale of my grandfather's marriage proposal. "It wasn't a proposal so much as a suggestion," she told me, dividing the citrus with her perfect little knife-nails. "We were on a double date, and he thought it might be neat if we went down to Las Vegas and got married." I let my scoff ring 'round the room, but scarcely dented its well-honed nonchalance.

"Yep," my grandpa replied. "I had a load of produce to deliver down South, and figured I might as well make it worth the drive."

I ate in silence, trying not to reveal that my life's only illustration of a functional marriage had just been reduced to an errand. "But don't worry," Grandma interjected. "He had to move fast, or I would have gotten away. We had just broken up for a month or so, and he realized he didn't like seeing me with anyone else."

Ooh, intrigue. An almost-grandpa. You were with someone else? Who?

"Bob."

Bob?

"Yep."

Pause.

So you've dated a total of two people, and they've both been named Bob?

"That's right."

Thus began the contemplation of types. When people look for commonalities among previous partners, it seems they pull on a physical thread; hair and eye color, body type, height. Sometimes they list activities like playing guitar, or World of Warcraft. I've even heard arguments for the ever-elusive personality type, such as Outgoing! or Deeply introspective! or my personal favorite, Horrifically antisocial in group environments! What no one ever talks about are names. And why would they? However, the patterns do exist; take my cousin, who had to clarify which long-term Ryan she was referencing until she eventually married Ryan F. Likewise, my sister has dated at least three Matts. Throw in a couple more and you have one of those VH1 shows where 'Ashlee,' 'Ashley,' and 'Ashleigh' must be individualized for behind-the-scenes confessionals, if nowhere else in their bikini-clad lives.

So, at what point do we stop classifying? In general conversation, I've always resisted it. I pretend to be deep and mysterious, subject to change... even if I have worn the same jean jacket for most of my life. My grandma, on the other hand, has been with the same man for sixty-five years; which makes me wonder if she even sees my grandpa as a type, or simply a fixture in the chair that belongs three feet away from the place where she keeps the remote. I wonder. If we get so entrenched in types that we can't see the forest for the trees, that doesn't change the fact that they are there... and more often than not, some variation of green. I wonder.

Then it occurred to me: I do have a type.

Unavailable.


2. In the immediate aftermath of this revelation, which wormed its way into most conversations I had last week, I realized how silly it sounds. In actuality, I got a ton of shit from anyone I told it to, and silliness emerged from there. But like most ideas that ring a bell, unavailable clanged in my head; and like most people do, I clung tight to the sound. What does it mean, anyway? To be unavailable? I ran through a list in my head, and realized that of the people who have made their way into my heart--or at least stopped in my head on their way there--a disproportionate number have been:

a) in a serious relationship with someone else
b) emotionally stunted
c) on another continent

In other words, totally and completely unavailable.

I shared this with my boss, who blamed it on age. "There's a simple solution," she told me, tucking her phone into her backpack. "Date older."

"Men your age, even close to your age, don't know what they want. Avoid the problem altogether and just... start browsing in a different section."

So, it's my age--the age made immortal by television, and by many a thirtysomething pretending to be younger for the purpose of entertainment: looking everything the part of a vibrant twentysomething, only minus the bad skin and colossally awkward existential crisis. It's my age. But what age am I on the inside? Most days, I oscillate between seven years old and seventy. Like a baby in an old-person suit, only minus the creep-factor. I am caught between somewhere and something, at once awed and saddened by the world. So how would dating someone older than me--than my body's age, if not my heart's--solve anything?

It would eliminate the drama, for one. Most people in their thirties and forties have managed to tone down the fart jokes, if not eliminate them altogether. Then again, my uncle is in his fifties and still eats coco-puffs out of plastic bowls, which he balances atop his stack of Playboys. Age is relative.

Unavailability, however, is precise.

It began on the playground, Roosevelt School, when I was six. Developed a crush on one of the boys in my class, but shortly thereafter, transferred to OAS: and between imaginary unicorn playdates, pined for the one that got away. Not much later, a good friend and I developed crushes on each other; always syncopated, never simple. When he finally kissed me, I shrank like a sea anemone... sucking into my skin out of the terror of possibility. When he got a girlfriend, however, I reserved the right to pine mournfully, bemoaning lost opportunities and the threat of my own aloneness.

When my first boyfriend told me he loved me, I wasn't ready. He doted after me, and I disappeared. Instead, I went for one who was in love with my best friend, then one who eventually fell in love with my other best friend, and a handful of others whom I spotted out the windows of moving cars. There was the college fling, milliseconds before I took off for a semester abroad; and let us not forget Bali, where I learned it is possible to have a chip on your shoulder the size of a meteorite and still be able to operate a vehicle. On an island of 4 million people, I fall for the one who is not allowed to date. What are the chances? Well, high--considering even the deepest relationship of my life was spent on a seesaw of are they-aren't they: a game that, at its worst, hurt others with its volatility... and even at its best, hurt me with it. I became accustomed to never knowing where we stood, or if the person I'd chosen would answer when I came knocking. The lights can be on for a long time, it seems, before you realize someone can't come to the door.

But! Recently, I have tried a more lighthearted approach. Just two months ago, I drove out of my way to meet up with an interest from college, to explore what possibilities did or did not exist. He invited me, so I came; I arrived at his house, antsy but confident, and we proceeded to walk around the neighborhood. When we met up with one of his female friends, I didn't think twice. It wasn't until she kissed him--at one point, leaning across me in order to do so--that I began to wonder if I had gotten my signals crossed. Late that night, my mom came in to make sure I'd arrived home safely. "How'd it go?" she asked, and I pulled the covers off my face. "I don't know which part was better," I gurbled. "That he was a total bore, or that he took me to meet his girlfriend."

Yes.

It has become a joke that, in a room of a dozen people, I will zero in on the only one with a life partner. Likewise, show me the man with the emotional availability of a tadpole, and that will be the one I want to marry. Is it some freak blip in my genetic code? Or simply human nature? When someone is in a relationship, they put off an energy; a confidence that makes them more attractive. Beyond that, there is the masochistic reality that wanting what we can't have makes us want it even more. And believe me, I live with a two-year-old. When I tell him he can't cross the street, he'll do everything to ensure that he crosses as rapidly and recklessly as possible; and while I like to think it will leave with his baby teeth, I know better. We've all played in traffic. And I don't think dating outside my age pool will do anything to quell that irrational urge, nor do I think that the unavailable I'm drawn to can be translated to a simple lack of vacancy: there is a deeper element to it, a paradoxical presence that I find impossible to resist. As much as I don't care to admit it, I am drawn to darkness. I am pulled to those who get caught in their internal nets, because I recognize them... and every once and a while, one recognizes me back. Our eel eyes lock on each other through their watery glass, and we shudder.


3. My second Sunday in Portland, I went to ecstatic dance at the Tiffany Center. Somewhere in the second hour, I pulled myself out of the sweat and over to one of the tarot altars; knowing absolutely nothing about a 'tarot altar' except that this one happened to be draped in yellow chiffon. It was the summer solstice. I let my hand fall to a card, studied the picture, and looked up the meaning; teeny words told me that someone was entering my experience, someone with whom I have the potential to create beyond my current realm of comprehension. It's a one-time window, apparently, and not a matter of how or if it is coming... only when. Naturally, I wanted it in writing. With an exact date, perhaps, and an indicator of what I should be wearing when said vision-bearer enters my life. But I made my way back to the dance floor on a wave of anticipation, and chose to focus on the other feeling that was seeping out of my heart: Foresight. The tarot told me what I already knew. To the top of my skin, there it was... the tingling when you've met someone's spirit a thousand times before, and from that moment onward, feel the story unfold outside your range of motion. When a soul sees a heartbeat, we have no choice--we can only slide into its beat.

What happens next is a matter of opinion. Of masterful storytelling.

Interlude: Perhaps you are telling stories with one another, and you tell him a name. (Names are a common denominator). Perhaps he tells you he is in love with that name, and nausea washes through you; a snap so potent, so pure, that you feel like you are are inside the particularly good lick of an 1980's song. You want to tell him, you make me want to listen to 80's music. Not I love you, not I'm sorry, not that. Just a key-tar solo and the kick of a bass. But instead, you remain silent: it's the same self-preservation that searches for neutral thoughts in the moments before sleep, giving the subconscious anything to hang onto that isn't him. Consciousness foams in and out, and instead of studying the lines on his face in the map of your mind, you are thinking that--for some people--cilantro tastes like soap. Perhaps this thought will make its way into your dream, and you will avoid seeing each other there. Or perhaps, you open your eyes next to each other in the waking world; fresh from each other's dreams, you can only wonder why he met you in his. No use crying over kissed fingertips. There's a thought. Are you playing me? 

But he dreams of flying. And it's all you've ever known.

4. If you've never found yourself here before, you've probably found yourself staring at someone's face as they spell out their u-n-a-v-a-i-l-a-b-i-l-i-t-y behind the cute curve in their lip that you've begun to memorize. I was there recently, and was reminded of how this moment always stands frozen in time. Suddenly you're aware of every smell, sight, sound; the feeling of trying to drink someone in because you're afraid it might be the last time, and when your brain replays this later, you want to make sure you get his eyebrows right. What about that lip curve? And the place where his shoulders begin?

Probably, like me, your brain starts to munch on old standbys... thoughts like, I am so so so so so so so so tired of feeling this way and this always happens and won't anybody ever want to be with me, too? It feels like everyone else is part of a secret society that you've lost your card for. Like that stupid admiral's club at the airport. It's a terrible feeling, but oddly, a powerful one: thrumming with imminent aloneness, beautiful sorrow. I tried describing this to someone recently, the sweetness bound up in sadness, but the subtlety was lost. Or maybe it's something he'll think of years from now, as he'll think of me; partially realized, perhaps, but stubbornly un-forgotten.

"I'm tender."

I know, Tender. 

Q: How many ways are there to make Red from Tender?

I've come to this feeling again and again, of inadequacy, and only just wondered whether it's worth letting go of. I rode my bike home that night, cold... and just like that, everything changed!*

*No it didn't. That's what happens in the movie version.

In reality, it was never really there at all. All the beautiful drama, the hyper-awarness that comes from wanting to appear mysterious to others--the idea that I, in the fishbowl of my head, can only be seen when magnified from the inside out--it's all a story. A different story, one I'm just learning to tell, is how to accept things as they are. Not what they could be, not what they feel like in a moment of recognition: for what they are. The sound it makes is like saying I love you over and over again inside your head, even though it feels unnatural. That type of unconditional love, according to Elena Brower, exists only there: it's the foundation for energy, the roots to take flight. And you know what? She's right.

5. There are terms of endearment and mutual fascination that cannot be captured in regular language.

I can hear your heart... I can hear your heart beating in your armpit. 

You know?

5. It's funny how we seek validation. Like, how I can't seem to trust my own instinct; I have to know if someone feels the way I do, because that will alleviate the compulsive need to check my internal radar for cracks. If it's cracked, then at least I can get away with convincing myself that they are the tricky ones--not me. If he never calls me again, it won't be because I'm unavailable. 

But to whom? 

In relationships, I tend to slip away. I become so saturated in someone else's thoughts and emotions, and into the thirst for each milestone, that my heart and head cease communication entirely. I'm unavailable to myself in the biggest way, as many are; in relationships as in unexpected phone calls, stomach-dropping memories, or in any moment where adrenaline takes over and we cease to exist. Somehow, though, realizing this--understanding my tendency--has taken its power away. I feel like the girl in Labyrinth when she realizes that David Bowie, despite being devastatingly sexy, is really just a man in tights. A magical king at the helm of a puppet empire, sure; but a king with flaws, and a man all the same.

Some things are outside our range of motion, but it doesn't mean we can't get a grip. My heart searches for metaphor, and for that softness where the brain meets the spine. In moments, I feel I am approaching my truth; my sadness, and the exact weight of what it feels like to believe in everything. I'm navigating types.

"There is intimacy in the morning," she said. "In not knowing. Just ask."

Mine, it feels like surrender.

What's yours?

Welcome to the Funhouse

When a house advertises as being "child-friendly," it could mean a variety of things: one, its occupants are baby-crazy, and will do everything in their power to ensure maximum exposure to little ones (interacting with parents only in cases of extreme pooping or crying); two, said occupants are living in a state of arrested development, drink out of plastic Hanna-Barbara cups, and are gigantic children themselves; or three, occupants have disproportionate affection for anything falling into the category of 'cute,' and believe a house full of children to be the perfect compliment to their shelves of collectible beanie babies and Hello Kitty sheets. Or, in our case, the house probably advertised as being "child-friendly" because there weren't knives sticking out of the couches. At least, none that we could see.

I arrived in Portland on Sunday, and with little more than a 10-minute car ride as buffer, was ushered into the world of velcro shoes and ergonomic baby carriers. It's what I signed up for, and I entered willingly. Even so, it was a tough first week: the thing about parenting, especially when you're not the actual parent but instead a surrogate spit-up shoulder, playmate, and guardian when the 'real thing' isn't available, is that it is 100% on-the-job learning. Sure, plenty of literature exists on how to speak to children in their own language; studies on reverse psychology, for instance. The entire Montessori library. However, after one week taking care of Benji and Johnny--2 1/2 years and 5 months old, respectively--I am a firm believer in learning as you go. There was no way of knowing, for example, what a two-year-old tantrum looks like; or how I would feel the first time Benji stripped off all his clothes in the bathroom at Sound Grounds, screaming that he "HAD TO MAKE A POO POO!" for a solid half hour while I begged for mercy on the grimy floor. Neither would I have suspected him to be strong enough to pick up the toilet brush and whack me in the face with it; but lo and behold, he is, and he did. I left the coffee shop with my tail between my legs, the recipient of at least a dozen looks of, "Oh, that poor teenage mother," and spent the next twenty minutes on the bus trying not to cry. It's hard not to take it personally, you know. And nothing could have prepared me for that. However, nothing but the sheer joy in Benji's voice when we sing "Wheels on the Bus"--or the look on Johnny's face when he stares up at me in awe, fascinated at the simple fact of beholding another human being--could have prepared me for the satisfaction I feel in taking care of them. They lift my soul. It's been a tough week, sure, but everyone knows beginnings are the worst; it's the week you eat your lunch in the bathroom, unsure of who to talk to, and go to sleep wondering why the hell you signed up in the first place. Then the sun crowns on the second Monday, you know how to work the copier--or in my case, the diaper bag--and all is right with the world.

That is, unless you are living in a total madhouse.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, gather round as we tell the tale of the CRAZY PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO SHARE SPACE! Watch as they hover over their 'tenants,' leaving passive-aggressive notes in lieu of actual conversation, and expect a two-year-old to be able to function at the mental capacity of an obsessive-compulsive robot!

Up until this point, I've had nothing but good luck with AirBnB. There are bound to be more than a few stinkers in the bunch, but I dunno: I guess I like supposing that the type of people who open their homes to a worldwide search engine would not go on to form emotional attachments to their forks and knives. Then again, I've been wrong before. In a drawer with dozens of forks, knives, and spoons of every imaginable variety--for a 2-person household--was a teeny-tiny pocket of utensils, most of which appeared to have been pulled from a high school cafeteria, labeled "Air BnB." If this was the first indication of a problem, it was lost on me. Who cares if we have to use the crappy silverware? I'm dealing with a two-year-old. It's a good day when he doesn't rub his face in his food before eating it. So, I was willing to let the silverware thing go--as well as the segregated mugs, singular knife, and tiny refrigerator shelf allotted for our use--in the name of embracing the unknown; after all, the boys' mother had handled our summer housing all the way from Thailand. She searched AirBnB for long-term rentals, and came across a home that looked perfect; spacious, reasonably priced, and child-friendly. I kept this in mind as I went into the bathroom on the first night, where a note behind the toilet gave step-by-step instructions on how to use the shower curtain. Past that, in my bedroom, I noticed a laminated copy of House Rules: No partying (duh), loud music of any kind (does "Wheels on the Bus" count?), or food--including tea--allowed in the rooms. However, "quiet solo-dancing" is okay. Mistaking this to be tongue-in-cheek, I approached one of the house's owners and laughed. "I like that solo-dancing is allowed!" I said, picturing him bopping good-naturedly along with the boys as we frolicked around the house. I figured no person would be uptight enough to specify "quiet solo-dancing" as the only permitted form of self-expression. But like I said, I've been wrong before.

Come one, come all, gather 'round and watch as the passive-aggressive notes begin to multiply exponentially, as if from nowhere! Observe the poor, hapless nanny as she attempts to control the uncontrollable, dancing around inflamed sensitivities while balancing a symphony of screaming infants atop her shoulders!

What began as mildly irritating--funny, even--deteriorated into madness as soon as the notes began to infiltrate our private belongings. Suddenly, the fact that shoes had been found in our third-floor suitcase--outside the designated SHOE AREA, which as any fool would know, is in the first floor hallway--was inspiration for a series of blaringly judgmental, invasive "tips" for following the House Rules. Overnight, our groceries had been arranged into a pyramid. Notes appeared on the sliding-glass door, deadbolt, dish soap, sponge holder, bathroom wall, and kitchen shelves. I began to function like one who is under surveillance, reading NPR articles about leaks of classified information and feeling as though I better not pick my nose. The boys, neither of whom are old enough to know what a shower curtain is, let alone wonder whether they're using it correctly, still responded to the anxious energy. Tensions ran high. I grabbed Benji by the wrist every time he went to town on the dishwasher buttons, but hated doing so; and rather than ride the storm of Johnny's afternoon cry, hushed him in the frantic hope that we'd remain as unobtrusive as possible. But as anyone who has ever lived with a toddler knows, "unobtrusive" does not exist. It's about as likely as getting said toddler to memorize a system for color-coding sponges; which, for the record, these people did. As I stood in front of the sink, trying to recall if the pink sponge was for oily dishes, Johnny unleashed a flurry of spit-up into my left ear and began to scream furiously. Meanwhile, I looked over the counter to see Benji--beside himself with glee at the newfound ability to control his penis--making perfect little crop circles of pee into the carpet. I yelled, "Benji, NO!" but he just looked up at me and giggled. And who could blame him? The only thing funnier than peeing on the carpet is knowing that, within the hour, we'd find a post-it note describing the best method for removing the stain.

And so it went. I'd try to let off steam at the end of the day, but never could. It is already the curse of the live-in nanny to feel as though we never have our own space; probably because, when it's said and done, we really don't. I can cloister myself in my room with its minimal sound barrier, pretending not to hear the babies cry when I'm "off-duty." I can leave the house as soon as their mom gets home, walking aimlessly down the street in search of any food that doesn't taste vaguely of peanut butter. But that doesn't change the fact that, even as I write this paragraph, one baby is draped across the chair behind me--kicking my neck with every ounce of strength his five months have given him--while his brother alternates between picking his nose and and eating his socks. I take time to myself because, if I don't, I end up feeling like another kid: like one more thing the mother has to deal with when she gets home at the end of the day. It's like that episode of Sex and the City ("what episode? I don't know what you're talking about, I have way too many intellectual hobbies to be able to reference that inane show") where Carrie discusses the way single people are treated by their married friends; with notable exceptions, in variations on a theme of Hopelessly Incapable. It's us versus them--as in, they could never possibly understand--and parents aren't much better. When it's time to get off the bus and I can't get the bike rack to return into its original position, the boys' mother adopts a stern tone and I can tell she is fighting the urge to parent me. When the bus driver waits for me to fold the stroller into its compact position--which I'm sorry, is FREAKING LABYRINTHINE--I can feel the weight of dozens of eyes upon me, judging me. And this is on public transportation, mind you. Where people either ignore you, or tilt back their heads and explain how they got each of their mouth sores.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, watch on in wonder as the single mother collapses the 'foldable' stroller in ONE FELL SWOOP--using only the tip of her pinky finger! Behold, behold as the bumbling nanny follows from behind, grinning as she takes a cream pie to the face!

Needless to say, in a job that is both emotionally and physically exhausting; one that, like parenting, offers little to no privacy, the last thing you need is to worry if you're making noise while you pee. It's enough to have a two-year-old watch you while you do it, congratulating you on your lack of splatter.

The night before we left our crazy house for good, I lay on the ground in my room, shamelessly engaging in 'down time.' I had delusions of grandeur, of exploring neighborhoods and reading books; but when it came down to it, could do little more than lie comatose. It's not for the fainthearted, this nannying business. It really isn't. And as much as I might squirm as I settle into my place in this family--not quite a parent, but definitely not a kid--I have never, ever had so much appreciation for what it means to raise a child. For the sheer amount of work it takes to engage with another human being, to smile and cry simultaneously as they eat, poop, scream, and laugh their way through a world that they still believe is a good place. Pondering this, I heard elevated voices coming from the kitchen, and went to the foot of the stairs. The owners of the house were yelling about the way we had "blatantly" been ignoring the house rules; in fact they had "just stopped telling us when we were breaking them," because it happened so often. Meanwhile, the boys' mother was slicing and steaming vegetables, cradling an infant, and calmly preventing Benji from putting his fingers in the garbage disposal. The tone in her voice was stoic, measured, as she informed our landlords that it was inappropriate for them to go through our belongings; I watched on, mesmerized by her patience. But when the landlords crossed a line, when they informed her that she clearly had no control over her children, I had no choice. I stepped in.

"Excuse me," I began. They looked up. They had just finished telling Mira that "not all members in her party" had been using the oven vent appropriately. Namely, me. And you know what? Fuck their oven vent. "All due respect, but up until this week, I had no idea how much work it is to take care of children full-time. This woman is thousands of miles away from her home and partner, has two babies who are jetlagged and completely culture-shocked, and she is also in school all day.

No offense, but this woman does not deserve to come home and feel uncomfortable. She is dealing with enough as it is. Therefore, I'm going to have to ask you to please... shut up." 

I'd like to say that the conversation ended, that my little speech stopped them dead in their tracks--concluding perhaps with rose petals being thrown at my feet, and talk of a small-screen adaptation--but these freaky people just blinked up at me and resumed their verbal abuse. After a certain point, it just became silly: like a clown walking off the same diving board over and over again into a thimble of water, the results were invariably the same. The thimble doesn't get any bigger, so you might as well laugh when you hear the splat. In this situation, there was  nothing more I could do... except leave the house, careful to lock the door exactly as I had been shown, and purchase one hell of a brownie. I tucked it in the fridge for the boys' mother, and wrote the following:

YOU ARE RASING THE NEXT GENERATION TO BE COMPASSIONATE, FUNNY, RESPECTFUL HUMAN BEINGS

AND THAT IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN COLOR-CODING SPONGES.

And of course, the irony of writing a post-it did not escape me.

In the morning, we gathered our things and waited on the sidewalk for our ride to Northeast Alberta; the funk zone, the heart of so many things, and the place we belonged all along. Benji ran around in circles like a yippy dog that had been short-circuited to perform the same action on infinite loop. Our friends pulled up and loaded us in, our bicycles and our backpacks and our crates full of mismatched tupperware, and a collective sigh filled the car. Benji garbled a made-up song about orange cats while chewing absentmindedly on the belt of his carseat, and I rattled a Ziploc full of plastic spoons at the baby; confident that, as we escaped into the Saturday air, it would be the last time we'd leave anywhere feeling like the saner ones.

Bee is for Bitch

When December rolled around and it was clear I wouldn't be returning home anytime soon, my mother replaced me with a dog. It's hardly unusual. For most of my friends, it was returning home after Freshman year and realizing that their childhood bedroom had been converted to a gym, sewing room, midlife meditation oasis, etc. Disturbingly, the rooms never made a complete transition; patchwork quilts coexisted alongside overpriced elliptical machines, peeling Johnny Depp posters alongside 'revamped,' Martha Stewart designer wallpaper. Many a late night bitch-session was devoted to this subject, to the loss of the sense of 'home' that we mistakenly believed to be bound up in the permanent existence of a Shrine to our Personal Shit. Lucky for me, my parents have never been into sewing, nor trendy fitness. They prefer to get their exercise outdoors, bounding through the back hills of Mission Canyon, followed closely behind by the loving, panting presence of Maggie: a rescue mutt who is about two parts adorable companion and two parts bitch from hell.

I understand, I really do. I got the email with Maggie's picture, followed by Mom's enthusiastic report that they were adding a new member to the family!!--and part of me curled into that, in the somewhat deluded idea that my absence had left such a gaping hole in their lives that they needed to fill it by any means possible. Oh God, how can we ever survive without her? Then the emails became more plentiful, the photographs more flattering than any evidence of MY first few years on the planet, and I started to get suspicious. You see, I've observed my mother around animals; maybe it's one of those genes that skips a generation, but place her in front of a prison lineup consisting of humans and cats, and she'll be hard-pressed to tell you which one she gave birth to. She pampers her cats, snuggles them, cradles them, and feeds them to the point of no return. Take one look at Ernest, our tank of a cat who has now reached the point in his obesity where he struggles with bathing, and you'll understand. Anyhow. When I saw the same infatuation creeping up between my mom and the newest creature, I figured it would be like the cats only more: more energy, more responsibility, and more to love. More for her to love, sure, but more for me as well. After all, I had dogs once! I love dogs.

Correction: I love dog. As in, one. And she died when I was thirteen.

Memories of Nellie came flooding back to me, actually, as I approached Maggie for the first time. I'd like to say it wasn't an instantaneous hatred, but I'd be lying: she took one look at me rolling my suitcase into the driveway for the first time in seven months--first time ever, as far as she was concerned--and proceeded to bark within an inch of her life. I looked down at her kindly, thinking perhaps she was just protecting the homestead; and in retrospect, she probably was. But then the mailman arrived the next day, two or three other vehicles pulled in and out of our driveway, all depositing human beings who intruded upon her so-called 'territory'... and she did nothing but cough up a few measly barks as they entered and exited. The average visitor would never know her venomous snarl, nor the fury she is capable of when you meet in a dark room in the middle of the night. No. She saved it all for me.

When it first occurred to me that my parents had adopted a creature with a vendetta against my individual existence, I was saddened. I took it personally; I watched my two-year-old niece throw a chew toy without having her hand bitten off, laughing and playing, and felt like the only kid not picked for kickball. I obeyed when my mother told me to accompany them on walks, to assert my presence in front of Maggie in a way that was non-threatening; I jogged with her around the reservoir, watched as she galloped over bushes and around rocks, and felt a glimmer of hope. But then we'd arrive back home, I'd enter the living room, Maggie would growl, and we'd start all over. Once, I looked over at her and my mom curled up on the couch, and saw the hairs bristle on Maggie's spine. I tried walking closer, and she snarled. My mom threw her on the patio. "It's not right," I told her. "I was here first!" My mom gave a little sniffle at her baby, now quarantined outside in the perfectly tolerable 70 degree Santa Barbara evening. "Yeah," she said. "But to be fair, that is her couch."

I tried a different approach. I'm used to Bali dogs, after all... mangy little assholes that alternate between darting in front of motorbikes, eating trash, and barking furiously at anyone who gets too close to their property. They're more frightening than policemen, and probably do more to deter crime as well. So by the third week of Maggie's dictatorship, I had stopped feeling sad, and started to get angry: she'd stare up at me with glassy, judgmental eyes, and I'd glare right back. She'd snarl at me, and I'd flash her my opposable thumbs, indicating my biological superiority. Maggie may be cuter, but I am smarter. I am the firstborn. It's on, bitch. 

It's difficult to pinpoint why it bothered me so much, or why I should care whether my parents' dog loves me as much as she loves them. I'm here for one more week, and after that, who knows; and if I'm only returning for birthdays and holidays, living out of a toiletry bag, who cares whether I'm subjected to the occasional growl or raised haunches? The only thing I can say is that Maggie's entrance into my life served as a loud, exaggerated reminder of what was already flashing across my brain: you are not welcome here. It's not my family, but the city itself--Santa Barbara, my hometown, the place where I feel at once utterly comfortable and dangerously apathetic. Being here, especially after being away, is like having a pimple on your cheek that keeps cropping up into your peripheral vision: other people don't even notice it, but for you, it is there every time you lower your gaze. I can't quite explain it, but the culture shock after living in Bali for seven months was more than just re-acclimation... I felt positively allergic to things I never even saw before. To make matters worse, about 3 weeks after arriving, I was rushed to the hospital for a severe reaction to bee pollen. One second I was drinking a smoothie, and the next, my face had swelled up to the size of a balloon; I turned an impressive shade of cranberry, broke out in nasty, itchy hives, and spent the next three hours in the ER having a drug cocktail pumped into my arm. Physically, recovery was a breeze: I got off with little more than heightened awareness and an EpiPen to show for the incident. Emotionally, however, I felt damaged. I went home and collapsed into the couch, Maggie's couch, and wondered if it's possible to feel safe in a place that no longer holds you.

Not willing to give up on the dog front, Mom pressed for an intervention. She and my stepdad are leaving for Europe at the end of the summer, and they want me to housesit: an endeavor made slightly more difficult if I'm unable to come and go without a "body blocker." Enter Wency, the Dog Whisperer: "body blocking" is just one of many new terms that she taught us last Saturday, pulling into the driveway amid a cacophony of barks. I watched her approach Maggie, half-expecting the dog to greet her with a lick and a smile; leading the jury to the inevitable conclusion that the problem, in fact, is me, has always been me, and that Maggie is simply doing what no one else in my family is brave enough to do. I sucked down my carrot juice in self-pity and waited. But Wency walked right up to Maggie, backing her into the orange trees--and to my surprise, was met with a throaty growl. Suddenly, I had an ally.

"See that paw?" Wency asked me. "That raised front foot means, don't hurt me. Your dog isn't antisocial, and she isn't shy. She's terrified." This shocked me. Of what? "These old habits are hard to break," she continued. "You have to rewire her. Right now, she thinks everything is a threat, and you're reinforcing that bad behavior by allowing her to get away with it.

"And you," she looked toward my mother, "You gotta take care of your baby bear." I glanced at my mom and giggled. I get the whole dog/human connection, but a bear? Come on. "No," Wency said. Then she gestured toward me. "This is your child. You're the mama bear. And you have to start sticking up for your cub."

That was when she gave us the airhorn. She walked around the driveway with the leash pulled taut, and handed my mother a small, red can. "When Jenna approaches Little Sister and Little Sister growls, you blast this air at the ground." I approached, Maggie bared her teeth, and we waited. My mom, visibly uncomfortable, did as she was told... and we all jumped a few inches when the can let off a ginormous PSSSSSST! at Maggie's feet. All, that is, except Wency. "Good. Now, we work on positive reinforcement. Every time Daughter enters the room, I want some serious treats--I'm talking filet mignon, chicken, fish--to rain from the sky. If Maggie sits for the treats, excellent. If she doesn't, no treats. And no baby talk." She zeroed in on my mom again, who at this point, looked like she'd just been told she would have to spend the rest of her life in a coat made of tarantulas. Wency just smiled and pulled a glob of liver snacks out of her pocket. "When you enter the room, Jenna, come with a treat. From this point on, Little Sister is going to associate your presence with something good. And don't expect the progress to be totally linear, either." She yanked back on the leash as Maggie began to plead sanctuary behind my mother's knees. "It will be one step forward, one step back. Just stick with it."

"It's a process of rewiring. Undoing bad habits so new ones can take their place. It's not an easy task... but it is a possible one."

Other than the obvious creep-factor of calling Maggie my little sister, Wency had some interesting things to say. Did you know, for example, that it is submissive to stroke a dog beneath her chin, because it is typically done to the alpha in a pack? Or that dog owners should always walk through a doorway before their pet in order to assert dominance? I imagined what it must be like to live at Wency's house, where dogs of all shapes and sizes crawl over her body and in and out of her aggressively-planted legs, smelling the day's worth of misbehaving canines and wondering if Wency had given a piece of her heart to any of these new, foreign creatures. I imagine it must be rough on the self-esteem, being the pet of a professional Dog Whisperer; kind of like being Halle Berry's husband, or the girlfriend of one of those really slutty rappers. But Wency seemed like the loyal type, and well-versed on the subject of establishing boundaries. She told my mom that she needed to be more discerning about who touches Maggie on the head, as it could easily interfere with the training. "I don't get why people feel the need to walk up and pet other people's dogs, and why their owners are okay with it. It's like, you wouldn't just walk up and rub someone's kid... so why do it to their dog?" My brain flashed to an image of children gathering around a watering hole, sniffing each other's butts and barking as their parents check them for fleas and ticks. I decided this didn't bode well for my upcoming nannying job, and decided to push it from my head. Humans and dogs are different, after all. Aren't we? I looked down again at my opposable thumbs. Out of the corner of my eye, Maggie lay curled up under the table. The whites of her eyes were shiny with apprehension, and I couldn't help but feel sympathy. We've both been hurt. It's not up to her to explain where or how she developed the fears that keep her from approaching my hand without worry. It's not her fault that she can't tell what may or may not be contained in my palm.

As the week went on, Maggie and I tried our new "treat therapy" with mixed success. For a few days, she willingly obeyed when I commanded her to SIT for a handful of chicken sausage; she liked it even better when she was given treats just for letting me walk through the room. Around Thursday, she grew bored with the prospect of peace and began snarling at me from underneath the table. She gets the airhorn when she does this, which sends my mom into a tailspin of whatifshedoesn'tlovemeanymore... but as Wency pointed out, dogs don't hold grudges, and neither should we. If she's punished, Maggie gets up the next morning and slobbers just as excitedly as she did before she was thrown outside. Her fear issues may linger, but they don't make her any less willing to love.

Something to think about.

~

Last Wednesday, I woke from a dream that my hands and feet had swollen to ten times their normal size. Right before consciousness snapped me out of the panic that I'd never again tie my shoes without assistance, I remember thinking: is this normal? With my bee pollen incident still relatively mysterious, I'm unsure whether it is the pollen itself--or bees in general--that I need to stay away from. Until I know, I am the EpiPen carrier upon which a thousand Pulp Fiction jokes were launched, upon which a thousand more are bound to come when I go to Portland. (Insert boredom here.) All that aside, a swollen feeling haunted me for the rest of that day. My dream-being had run her hands up and down my body, monitoring the inflammation, wondering how much of what was going on could be accounted for in the realm of "normal" allergic reactions. Even while dreaming, I worry about how much I need to worry. If a heart remains broken for months, say, even years after the fact... can that be called normal? Am I whole? Am I allergic?

Thought #1: There's a science to the muscle memory of being hurt. We muscle ourselves into the position, and so we must muscle ourselves out. I sat in the car the other day, listening to an old love play a broken record; and as much as I wanted to help, wanted to be able to speak up in a voice that sounded like my own, my body felt glued to the spot. My mind fell into a groove worn slick from years of overuse. I sat with my gaze fixed forward, listening to the radio as it spat out the soundtrack to a clash of egos, and thought of how many instances in my life I have (re)acted out of fear.

Thought #2: There are two types of change, qualitative and quantitative. In the former, some have gone further than others: perhaps they don't feel the need to sit in cars and reenact scenes from nightmares past. In the latter, however--in the quantitative, the sum, the distance run--we are the same. Some of us have stickers to show for it, and some of us behave the same old way when an unfamiliar hand reaches toward our face: we bolt. It doesn't matter if it has treats in it.

But whether or not we run away, we've still changed. The same amount of days have passed between two people since the last time they met; and in that regard, we're all equal.

So. Sometimes, usually in a fit of caffeine, I believe that I'll move past the history that holds me down. I'm slowly, slowly creeping out from underneath the table where I feel invisible. It would be nice if treats rained down from the sky every time I made progress, rewarding me for sitting in the same space with a new mind; chocolate, ice cream, something to keep my mouth occupied while my brain catches up to the place where my heart is. 'Til then, however, I have a lap full of venison snacks, Maggie's favorite, and I'm about to go walk through the kitchen. We have an infinite capacity for change. I will throw them at her feet, and hope that one day she associates me with something good.

Post-Its from the Edge

Edge of reason, edge of the universe, edge of sanity; poised on the edge of a knife, as it were, as we always are.

It happens so fast. A minute ago, I was living in Bali; hot rains poured down my face and neck, and I held Olivia's hand as we pounded the steaming gravel with our bare feet. Just a second ago, I was on a plane home from Texas, and something called the Grand Canyon yawned across the land below. I pressed my face to the window, despite the hundreds of faces who had probably done it before me; like me, wanting to see if they could muss the un-foggable with their foggy, germ breath. The flight attendant told me to please place my seat in its full upright position, which was weird, because I never put it back in the first place. I adjusted. The plane adjusted. When my ears popped, I could hear my music more clearly. I do this weird thing whenever I wear earphones, which is to periodically take them out of my ears and assess whether the music is audible to the people around me...so there I was, causally pulling in and out of my ears, caring but not caring whether someone will care that I was listening to Anais Mitchell at a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet.

The lady sitting next to me thought I couldn't see her reading over my shoulder, these letters as they spilled from my fingertips, but I did. I wrote a sentence to her, a cryptic message without the bottle, wanting to know if she react. She didn't. She did, however, open her mouth and begin speaking to her husband in Chinese, and I felt like an idiot.

It had been a long day. I woke up in Texas to Thunder and Lightning, petulant twins who wouldn't quit their whining until I peeled my head off the pillowcase, pulled my earplugs out of their sockets, and padded over to the window. The lightning purple and the thunder boom hugged one another, flashing in such short succession that I wondered why they didn't just get it over with and crack into the flowerpot outside my door. That's the funny thing about watching lightning. You know the odds are slim, but secretly, every time it strikes across the sky, you know it has to be hitting somewhere--and part of you marvels at the fact that this time, just this time, it wasn't you. I pulled my things together and drank a VitaMineral smoothie, choking down the graininess in a vain attempt to make my stomach stop its gymnastics. The planes were all delayed. We climbed into the car and waded out into the San Antonio river-roads, the water rushing up to the knees of our jeep, hinting that the day's travels would be interesting if nothing else.

"I can't promise you happiness," my Uncle Andy told her, many moons ago. "But I can promise you excitement."

I don't remember the exact point when I realized that the situation was serious; it was more of a slow burn, an accumulation of vacant traffic lights and abandoned cars. Each time we barely got through a massive puddle, we laughed nervously and presumed it would be the last one of its kind. By that point, the rain was so hard that I could barely make out the cars on the freeway--just a parade of little red ants. Red. They were going nowhere. We revved our way through the largest puddle yet, and I had the distinct sensation of bobbing. Cars aren't supposed to bob. But I thought bob, and then I thought apples, and I allowed my brain to make its little free-association game for the 45 minutes that we sat there, motionless, on the swampy freeway. We were going nowhere. From the soft-rock station, someone asked, "Alfie... what's it all about, Alfie?" and I had the knee-jerk urge to pull headphones out of my ears, something, anything to feel control for a fraction of an inch of a second. My hands made a fingerball in my lap as I prayed, prayed, prayed. A man got out of the car ahead of ours, and went from window to window with a message: we were going to have to back up. Ha! Haha! There was no getting off this freeway except for the way that we came; pause, rewind. So we did. She did, and I did by looking out the window at the cars as they pulled K turns and U turns and all sorts of alphabet turns, all of us searching for the same word: out.

And we found it. When we finally got off the freeway, the butt of the car having pushed its way back through the flood and out into the road and awayawayaway from the deepest, from the worst of it, I realized what had happened. We pulled into to the airport, knowing full well that there'd be no flying for a good, long while--but still, it was somewhere to be. It was a roof and a sound barrier against the smashing rain. My grammy held me and I laugh-cried as residual adrenaline crackled through my body. "There were angel hands on my hands," she told me. Angel hands. I floated out of the car and through security, mistaking each and every person for my long lost love. The woman in front of me dropped her driver's license and we made pointless conversation, and I would have married her if she had asked me. That's how good, how completely reckless it felt to be alive.

Earlier that week, I had watched Moore, Oklahoma collapse from the seat of FOX news, compliments of my Republican grandfather. He sat in his chair for most of the day, a plastic glass of chablis balancing on the seat of his walker. He yells at the television. He's a stereotype in other ways, too, mostly in the fact that he loves me more than most other people on the planet combined. I sat in the leather chair next to his, photo albums splayed in my lap, scrutinizing their pages for any information I might have missed before; names and faces that mean something different each time they see the light of day. Frozen moments: weddings, reunions, graduations. Babies show up and then stop being babies, or they get more hair, and more babies show up and then it all happens again. I lost hours in those pages, only coming up for air when one of the FOX faces said something especially stupid. I walked to the kitchen now and again, pouring myself glass after glass of cold kombucha. Anticipating the question, I answered. "It's fermented Chinese tea, known for its health properties. It has, um, good bacteria in it. B vitamins. Stuff." He took a breath in that stuck, briefly, in the back of his throat. He gave one of his gnarled fingers a good, hearty tap against the clicker and blinked in that perfect way of his. "I have the weirdest granddaughter," he said. And I knew that I'd love him forever.

My life that week became a festival of wondering what I'd do with my future, what I could possibly say to assure the older generation that they hadn't wasted their time in creating me. Meanwhile, the world outside the window continued to fall apart in large, flaky pieces against the sky: I called Phil in Oklahoma, trying (but failing) not to sound broken when he said he'd barely missed the storm. When I finally made it home, Santa Barbara met me at the door with a brush fire and 4.8 earthquake. A thousand Facebook statuses were born, but none bore any of the information I was searching for. What about a family code? Should we have a family code? What if someone calls and says that you've gotten into an accident, mom, and I need to come get you? What about those girls that were kidnapped for so many years? What about the natural gas leak? What about that, mom? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I drove into the visitor's parking at Vista del Monte, a retirement community where my best friend's grandmother spent her final days. For the last week, she woke in a panic, thinking the world was falling apart; in her mind, there were always fires and earthquakes. "Did I die?" she asked. "No, grandma," he told her. "You're in Santa Barbara, at Vista del Monte." Her perfectly-glossed fingers clamped over his like a mousetrap, holding him there even when her gaze could not. I sat there, my hands in my lap, smiling but not wanting her to think I was staring; hoping that, even if she couldn't register my identity, that she knew I would never want to make her unhappy. I am desperate to please: the whole week in Texas, I wanted to please with the promise of a car, the kind they advertise for on national TV, and a job that looks good at the end of a sentence. But then the TV flipped to a disaster scene, and something else overtook me. "Don't ever get to 87," my grandfather said. He meant it as a joke, but I felt my stomach sink. Will I get the option? It feels sometimes like we're dancing on eggshells, overstaying our welcome on a sold-out stage. I keep picturing one of those hooks from a silent film, the kind that appears at the corner of the frame and yanks the human off the stage. Roses at her feet.

According to the photo albums, I have to have one of three things to be real: a wedding, a baby, or a graduation. One out of three ain't so bad, but I want more. We all want more for ourselves. It's the reason we get out of bed in the morning, despite whatever greets us on our homepage. It's the reason I still touch my finger to a hot plate before picking it up with my bare hand. I still picture a world where anything is possible. When an eyelash lodges on my cheek or the clock reaches 11:11, I make a wish. I catch myself feeling selfish when I wish for anything other than the safety of my planet, for the goodness of the whole; how could I possibly think about myself at a time like this? Doesn't the world need every little bit, even my little wishes, to get by? Then again, maybe it needs me just as badly as I need it. Maybe it needs me to hold my breath as I go through a tunnel, wishing for a first kiss, believing that there is still something to believe in.

I felt that in spades at St. Anthony's Cathedral, five rows back, at the Santa Barbara High School A Cappella concert. I remember what it was like to be up there, dripping under your robes, the music making its way through your mouth like breathing. In, out. I was in the audience, but I remembered; each person up there is the king of their own universe, the epicenter of what feels like The Way Things Will Always Be. Then each one will unpack a box or three, or thirty, in a dorm room that looks like everyone else's; each asymmetrical haircut, so deliberate from the perspective of one who looks out at the audience, will blend in with the collective mohawk that is UC Berkeley. I was overwhelmed with compassion for the singers, those seniors in high school, each one more confident than the last. They have no idea what they're in for. I worry sometimes that I hit my stride in high school; I see photos and, instead of marveling at how far I've come, wonder if my eyebrows will ever look as good as they did when I was seventeen. It was a very good year. Yet no matter what, I always return to this; I look down at my finger and the ring that contains Bali, or remember the epic pain that was freshman year at Scripps, and exhale a deep sigh of relief. Even if I could, I wouldn't go back and do it all again. Even if I had all the wishes in my pocket, all the DeLoreans in the world, I'd never choose to be anywhere except right here.

Because right here, in this room, lives the Wisdom of No Escape. On the freeway in Texas, I sought comfort in the idea that I'd soon be out of the extreme weather--I'd get in a plane and fly far far away, to California, where floods and hurricanes never happen. But they do. They burn up mountains and we call them fires, but in the end, they're the same. They're a reminder that we're only ever here, just this: there aren't enough planes in the universe to stay permanently suspended, thousands of feet above the place where all the bad stuff happens. A gigantic fault line runs up my California coast, and each time I enter a new relationship, we make a silent agreement that someone, eventually, is going to hurt. It's what happens when you care. Dying, I hear, is what happens when you live.

In the car on my last night in Texas, on the way to see a stage adaptation of Picnic, my grandfather was regaling me with his opinion of various world religions. My grammy's hands tightened on the wheel. "Not to be a fatalist," she said, "But say this is the last time you're ever going to see your granddaughter. Do you really want the last thing you say to be something to do with your obstinate politics?" "No," he told her, and laughed. "You're right." So we talked about ___________. It doesn't matter, in the end, what it was. It doesn't really matter what we talked about.

I've done, and continue to do, a variety of stupid things. While shopping in Lazy Acres, I tried to fill a bulk bag with chocolate-covered goji berries... and when they dripped out slowly, one at a time, I gave the thing a hearty thwack until SHOOMP--approximately three pounds of candy exploded into the sack. This provided, what ees it you say? A conflict of interest. I was interested in the candy, but not in the $25 price tag I had inadvertently acquired. So... I left it there. My moral alarm clock started clanging away, but I left the bag of candy in the store; accumulating a year's worth of bad karma, perhaps, but making my way into the sunlit parking lot all the same. The residual fire in the air had illuminated the sky in a flush of reds and yellows, poking out from behind the Santa Ynez mountains in what only can be described as glory. Sure, I knew it was bad; but it looked so pretty. There are natural disasters, and there are deaths. There are goodbyes and hellos, neither of which has a guarantee. But there's beauty in everything. There's really and truly, beauty in everything. Jeremy said something to me in the car, and I only half heard.

"Hold on a sec. I'm distracted by the apocalypse."

And distracted I was. And distracted I am.

But it's only for a moment. Tomorrow, I'll be new.