Grace.

Sensory overload. Everytime I’m at the airport I feel like running into a brick wall until I can’t feel anything anymore. Intercom: "Flight 2778 to Phoenix will begin preboarding in five minutes." People waiting around gate five actually applaud. Bastards must have been waiting for hours to have that kind of reaction. Clapping for a chance to get onto an overbooked airplane? Like seals. Better than the real thing, even.

Where was I? Oh yeah, sensory overload. Cell phone rings and it’s mom, “Nu, did you get there yet?” As if the clambering wheels of a garbage can passing by me aren’t proof enough that I’ve landed on another planet, then certainly the other ten people around me who are on cell phones must come through my mom’s ear piece loud and clear. “She’s gone to hell, Ma,” everybody is telling her.

“How are you, docha, daughter,” She asks. My eye lids are sort of glued to my dry eyeballs because I’ve spent all day on a computer at work, and I’ve just pulled out my laptop at the airport to get some quality writing time in. I’m starting to think that maybe a pen and paper would serve the purpose, but that’s just so 1992. I simply can’t.

A buzzing sound fills my ears. It’s the chorus of everything electronic vibrating like cicadas. The mating call of all things inorganic, non-reproducing and artificially warm. I check the battery time remaining on my computer and it reads "6:30 hours (93%) remaining." This actually makes me smile. I smile because of how charged my battery is? Dear God, I must have something wrong with me. Where did the girl go who swore she’d never own a cell phone? Cell phone... cell phone....

“Oh, sorry mom,” I say. I’ve forgotten that she was on the phone. Too many distractions to pay attention to the sound of a mosquito buzzing in my ear. “What did you say?”

“How are you?” She repeats.

“Fine, mom.” And then I procede to bitch her out for calling me just to find out if I’m alive. “Mom, just assume that if you don’t hear from me, I’m alive.” I realize this doesn’t make sense. But seeing how I am with small electronics, I’d find a way to call her from my death bed. I’d somehow wire together my IV and the help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up-cord, while using my Jell-O as a battery pack, and voila.

“You seem bothered,” She says. I don’t even know where to begin. She called me while I was hauling my whale of a bag down a half mile stretch of concourse. I actually considered stopping just because some stupid piece of plastic was vibrating in my bag. Shoulder pain, sweaty inner thighs in a skirt, thirst of a desert, need to urinate like a prisoner, and I actually considered stopping to answer a phone? What has my world come to?

I think I’ve forgotten what’s real and what’s not. I think I’d die without an internet connection. I check my email one hundred times a day. And that’s not an exaggeration. All four of my accounts deserve my attention. What did I used to do with that time? Well, I used to chat on AIM.

No. Before that.

I used to listen to the radio while shaving my legs. I’d sneak through my parents’ closets and try on my mom’s shoes. I’d invite my friends over for cooking parties and movies. I’d stay up till 3:00 AM, writing in my journal, the paper kind.

Technology isn’t new in my life. The first time I saw a modem was in 1990. It was an entire computer with its own keyboard and screen. My dad got it from work so they could reach his jugular through the phone line in the middle of the night, “in case of emergencies.”

I think the role of technology has changed for me. It used to be a compliment to my interactions with people. It used to be a treat. Cell phones for emergencies only. Chatting online to make plans with friends. Going out to a movie for my birthday. Since when did everything become urgent?

For me, I think technology has replaced the roles that people used to fill. Part of it is due to distance, that I now live far away from my hometown friends. Some of them have moved away too, on to busier and more complicated lives. The other part of it is that technology takes some of the edge away from human contact. Tone? Eyes? Smile? Body language? Not necessary. Meeting a man in person? I’d have to drive an hour just to spend ten minutes looking for parking. By the time I’d get there, I’d have to turn around and go home because I have to get up at the butt crack of dawn to get to work. Cell phones haven’t replaced people entirely, they’ve just... given me an excuse not to put that extra effort in to meet people and interact with them.

Why call? I’ll send an email. Birthday card through snail mail? I’ll send an e-card instead. Why meet in person? I’ll just use my cell and call from the car. My bad reception-call dropping-money eating-overly sensitive keypad-cancer causing-fart of a phone. I hate it. I hate it more than I love anything. GAH! What a waste of human emotions. My existence is so wrong.

I’m exhausted. So tired. Just... want... to... sleep in a pile of leaves. Pick strawberries the next morning and make jam in the afternoon. Get caught in the rain on my walk across a field. Grass up to my thigh.

God, where is the redemption in all of this? My eyes are on fire. My wrist has poison ivy from the keyboard. I feel like a torture victim. Torture at my own hands. It’s. Got. To. Stop.

“I’ll call you back later, Mom.”

I’m almost on vacation, fool. Just a few more hours left till I head to the airport. And this isn’t just one of those weekend trips with two days of travel, and no re-lax-ashion. This is the wide load. Cabin, lake, family, probably a lot of s’mores. A boat, and my pretty, new laptop. That baby and I are gonna sit by the lake, hopefully in the shade, and I’m going to write me some stories. The rest of my time will be spent looking for the perfect marshmallow roasting sticks. And if there’s any time left over after that, there will be some high contact boggle going on. By contact, I mean me poking my cousin and trying to pinch her soft, clammy self in an effort to distract her.

There may or may not also be the following:

1. Jigsaw puzzle
2. Swimming
3. Sleeping in till 10:00 AM (that’s a big deal for me)
4. Sand castle building with my cousins
5. Sitting on a dock with my feet in the water
6. Watching the sunset and then the stars
7. Getting eaten alive by mosquitoes
8. An art project of some kind involving sock puppets and grass
9. Eating and cooking outside, possibly baked potatoes from the fire pit
10. Some good boozing

I think that’s a good list to start with. Come to think of it, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

We had an agreement...that I wouldn't write about him. And I actually said, "But you're such a huge part of my life, how can I not write about you?" He insisted, and I caved. Fine. No blog, then.

 

Now, I can't imagine that I would have responded like that. I've been keeping journals ever since I learned how to write. I have journals going back to second grade. Writing has been in my life far longer than he was, and it’ll stay with me long after we marry other people. Another ex actually called my journals baggage and asked me to throw them away. Jesus. What fucking idiocy. I’m on the verge of writing something far meaner about that subject, but I find myself self-censoring. What if he finds the blog? Better to be graceful.

 

In the aftermath of the break up, one of my friends emailed me: “Don’t you want to be unmarred so you can find out who you really are? Don’t you want to be a clean slate?” I never really thought of being “marred” as a bad thing. In fact, I misread the word at first, and thought it said, “unmarried,” which is something I definitely didn’t want to be.

 

I didn’t ask for things to happen the way they did. We both gave and took. We gave as much as we could, and I didn’t want to take more than what was right. I’m sure he didn’t either.

 

Change. Uncalled-for, Inconvenient, and unwelcome. I used to work as a gift wrap girl. Being Jewish, I’d work on Christmas Eve. My boss loved that. It was five minutes from closing time, nobody was shopping by this point, and an old lady walked up to the counter. She set a sweater in front of me and said, “Wrap that for me in #4.” As I tore off the right amount of paper from the ream and got her a box, she began to tell me about her husband who was in the hospital. “This will be the first time in almost 40 years that we won’t have spent Christmas at home. He’s just too ill now, so the whole family is spending Christmas at the hospital with him.” I didn’t know what to say, and I must not have been thinking clearly, because I stammered, “Well, sometimes change is a good thing.”

 

Boy, did she ever unleash the mother-load on me. “NO IT ISN’T! Change is NOT a good thing. How could you say such a thing???” she screamed. The tirade continued, “That is the worst cliché I’ve ever heard. What an insensitive thing to say. My family is devastated, absolutely devastated.” I wrapped the package in three minutes flat. Record time. And I gnawed on the foot that was lodged in my mouth for hours after. I do that often though, say something and then dissect it and overanalyze it. Things like this eat away at me. Here I am, years later, still remembering this conversation. I hate hurting people.

 

Maybe she was right. That phrase was a cliché. And I’m sure it was an awful time in her life… it’s actually my biggest fear. I used to tell him, “If you die before me, I’ll kill you.”

 

The man she’d spent her life with was dying right in front of her eyes. There are no words to describe what she must have felt, even though she found some to share with me.

 

Unwanted change. From willingly marred to unmarried. From living with him in our home to living with my parents in their home. From buying bedding and a dining room set, to dividing up our things and boxing them up. Divorce without marriage. I didn’t ask for it, but it happened. And so, here I am.

Change in this case turned out to be a good thing. As painful as things have been, I’ve actually found myself walking down the street, smiling for no reason. Just enjoying being my marred, single self.

Carpools in the mornings and evenings include my father and his lifelong friend, Vadim. Vadim’s wife, Sofia, also rides with us. The three of them work together and the couple lives five minutes by foot from my parents’ house.

The remarkable thing is that my dad and Vadim worked together in Russia thirty years ago. Before we immigrated, they owned neighboring dachas, cabins, in Belarus. My summers under the age of six consisted of climbing around on the rafters of Vadim’s unfinished dacha, smelling the fresh wood smell, watching him hammer in nail after nail. This was a different country and a different time, when kids could still do dangerously stupid things and parents would encourage it because at least you were getting fresh air.

My brother once fell off a roof when he was seven. Funny now, not so funny then. Another time, during the winter, he climbed up a pine tree, fell off, and landed with his back on the sharp tips of a pair of skis. Both of them. Took him a couple of seconds to be able to get a breathe of air into his lungs. What he doesn’t know is that I had moved the skis to that spot the second before he fell. What? It was an accident.

When I was four, I almost plummeted to my death when I started climbing a ladder to get into the unfinished attic, and I lost my footing. It took my father far too long to hear my meowing, and when he found me, I had abandoned all hope of rescue. I was on my last ounce of strength, dangling by my tired arms, totally scared. Once, I got sun burnt so badly that the only way my parents could quiet my crying was to give me an umbrella for shade… inside the house. No sunscreen, ladies and gentlemen. And you might know how pasty I am.

When I was five, I’d follow butterflies through Vadim’s potato plants and sneak strawberries and gooseberries from his garden. I’d eat warm tomatoes right off the vine. I used to follow him around and ask him all kinds of questions. My father and Vadim each helped the other build a chimney by hand. Borrow my saw? Sure. Need a hand putting that door up? No problem. Come over for dinner? Thanks, I will. They were, and still are, like brothers.

Vadim has a grown son, Sergei, and a grown daughter, Masha. They each have their own children too. This morning’s carpool was a recap of what Sergei ran into while he was on-call at the hospital last night.

Vadim: “Yes, he had to perform a six-and-a-half hour surgery on the idiot. Both eyes were lacerated. Well, I should say, one eye was lacerated… the other one was missing.”

Dad: “Vat do you mean? How did zat happen?”

Vadim: “These two men got in a fight over one of the guy’s wife. Apparently, guy number one said something guy number two didn’t like. So number two took a knife and slashed across number one’s eyes, and voila. One eye popped out, a couple of the bones in his face were broken, and the knife itself sort of snapped. So Sergei had to take that metal piece out of the remaining eye. ”

Dad: “Vell, can za man see out of hiz vun eye?”

Vadim: “Just 10%.”

Dad: “Zat’s awful.”

Vadim: “But that’s not the end of the story. You see, guy number one had some friends with him who didn’t like what had happened to his buddy. So they went after the attacker. And they did the same thing back to him…slashed his eyes straight across. So they brought the second guy into the same hospital as the first one.”

Me: “I bet they were in the same operating room.”

Dad: “How ironic.”

A moment of silence passed, and I just couldn’t help myself.

Me: “Well, at least they couldn’t see each other.”

We all guiltily laughed. But I really did wonder what would happen once the two men would come out of their anesthetically-induced comas. What would they say to each other?

Guy #1: “Hey man, sorry about that thing I did to you.”

Guy #2: “No, I’m sorry.”

Guy #1: “Naw, it’s cool.”

Guy #2: “Okay. Good. Because I was really worried you’d be mad at me.”

Guy #1: “So, you wanna learn brail together?”

Guy #2: “Sure. You want my Jell-O?”

They probably wouldn’t say anything because they’d be hauled off to jail. Maybe they’d forge a lifelong friendship while in prison, or maybe they’d finish each other off and end the misery.

I’ve heard that common experiences forge unbreakable bonds between people. But then again, the pendulum could swing the other way and the same experience can drive two people so far apart that they’ll never be able to reconcile. Something tells me it’ll be the latter in this case.

I had one of those amazing weekends—the kind where you don’t notice that your legs are tired from walking all over, that you’re hungry because it’s 2 AM and you’re still awake, that your feet are filthy from the rain-and-flip-flop combination. New York has a way of letting a person forget about herself.

Magnolia Bakery, Carrie Bradshaw’s residence on Perry Street, beer at a soundproof coffee shop on the corner of Traffic and Noise, Thai for dinner, a karaoke bar for drinks and Queen. Walking with a friend, arms around each other under an umbrella, jeans rolled up. Standing under an awning, him scarfing down his cupcake, me eating mine with a fork. Milk propped up on a window ledge. Peering into people’s windows, checking out their bookshelves and furniture, the lucky kids with ping pong tables in their bedrooms.

Each time I come to New York, I arrive wounded, unsettled, looking for comfort. I crawl into it like I’m crawling into bed. Like laying on my back inside a tent, looking up at the silhouette of rain drops trickling down, hearing the sounds of a wet forest. Healing light comes in orange and green through the tarp, mixes with neon signs and yellow streetlamps. And I mix myself into the experience until I fade away completely and am finally happy.

I saw an old friend of mine who’s always been easy for me to understand. But this time, for some reason, I saw him through a third eye, and he wasn’t so simple anymore. He took me to see the Squid and the Whale at the Museum. I was scared, just like in the film. I wanted comfort, I wanted to be a Philistine, and he was taking me to the depths of the sea. I wanted to hold his hand, to stand on the shore, and he was telling me to swim into the blackness.

We sat down the hall on a bench in the rainforest. And I wanted to throw my watch into the trees. That’s how much I wanted to stay, just so I could see him in that light a little longer. to absorb who he had become while I was busy staying the same. And I faded away completely and was finally happy because things didn't go the way I had planned.

It happened. And it was a wonderful moment.

My usual metro ride home. My nose is stuck in The Broker by John Grisham—terribly written, but very much like watching TV. I’m tired by this point from a nine-and-a-half hour day at work, and I probably don’t smell so good. Okay, I definitely don’t smell good, since I didn’t shower in the morning. What? It’s just a thing I do once in a while. (Once, in fourth grade, one of my friends saw me looking disheveled at the end of the school day—probably the way I looked on the ride home—and she said very seriously, as if she’d never noticed this before, “Man, you’re ugly when you’re tired.” She was probably right, but it still hurt my feelings. It actually knocked the wind out of me.)

So, halfway through the commute, blah blah blah, lawyer on the run, CIA puts a man in witness protection, incompetent president, and then I look up. It took my brain half a second to recognize that the man smiling at me, nay, grinning even, was actually someone I knew. David. We worked together last summer.

I wave at him across the train car and mouth, “Give me second.” Collecting my things, I elephant my way past the Indian man next to me, who, now that I think about it, had also just run into some random friends on the metro. I try not to step on anybody’s feet, so I’m walking in a zigzag between bags and limbs, swinging from the rails like a monkey, smelling like one too, and I arrive at the open seat next to him in a few seconds. I plop my bag down on the floor, which lands on David’s foot, and then I plop myself down, the self that ends up sitting on the right flap of his suit coat. God. I am so clumsy.

We talk until I have to get off the train. He tells me about a girl who stomped on his heart and left it bleeding on the floor. “What happened?” I ask. With a smile, he tells me that he went to great lengths to find a pharmacist who would write some non-prescription things on an RX label and supply him with an empty pill container. David filled it with Hershey’s Kisses, found the girl’s address and mailed it to her. She freaked out and didn’t call him. Not even a “thanks, but no thanks.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “I just like doing nice things for people. I don’t expect anything in return.” That made me smile, and I got a wonderful feeling of warmth in my stomach, almost as warm as when a guinea pig peed on my foot in third grade.

I think that feeling is called hope, because it lasted with me through the evening, and it kept me from snapping at my parents all night. Because I’m twenty-three and I live at my parents’ house, and I’ve been in a bitchy mood since my break up. Poor parents. Ugh. I know that “nobody owes me nothin’.” And yet they give me everything. That’s the purest truth.

I believed David when he said he didn’t expect anything in return. I know there are people out there who say something like that and mean it. It’s just nice to run into them once in a while. Especially in DC.

I think about my other half a lot. I see him everywhere and nowhere. I’m like a kid, lost in a store, tugging on someone’s sleeve, asking, “Will you help me find my mommy?” Wrong analogy maybe, but it elicits an accurate vomitous feeling. Sort of like the Orphan Annie sympathy mixed with a tinge of trapped-in-an-elevator desperation and a smidgen of oh… pathetic-ism. Yes. That’s a word.

Most single women are like that. They look at every man they meet as a potential mate, and that gets in the way a lot of the time. I used to make friends with men because they weren’t catty, and they didn’t hold grudges. They’d make me feel good not because of the prospects of procreation and their overall domestic qualities, but because of the understanding part—the way my male friends just got me, with no veiled jealousy or expectations. Sort of unconditionally. I loved that.

What ever happened to unconditional friends? Just letting a person be… without judging them or prodding them for something. So a person lights up once in a while, or is mousy in public places, or tears herself down with sarcasm, or loves Jesus. There is so much loneliness as is. Why make gaping voids?

Pablo Neruda used to think about that a lot. His sadness was all over the place, but I think he got it right.

“ I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way.”

There is no room sometimes for ourselves. There is only the other. And that eliminates the void because we become like one. Lover or friend. It doesn’t matter.

I want that. I want it badly enough that I look at strangers and think we were meant to be together. Like when you’re on a bus and think, “If the light turns green by the time I count to five, then he’s the one.” Or if you reach the end of the sidewalk and beat the blue car to the intersection, then you’ve made the right choice. These are just validations, I know. John Cusack is the master of these things.

Perhaps the wanting is the getting. Maybe that drugged up feeling of hope is what I’m really after, where for a moment I feel that all is right, and everything is out of my hands. I can just sit back and let chance take the blame for my loneliness. And in that instant when the light turns green, John Cusack hails the bus down, pays his fair, and sits down right next to me. And we become best friends forever.

***

Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I do not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I used to watch people on the metro. I used to look at women’s wedding rings and then do a complete once-over of the woman herself, exactly the way men do it. It’s sleazy, I know. I used to think to myself, “Who has the other ring?”

I’d wonder what kind of a man it would take to love her. To love her enough. To want to marry her. Crooked teeth, ratty hair, blubbery arms. What kind of man does it take to love that many imperfections?

I’d tell myself that he must be bald and fat. He must be full of imperfections himself. Only she could love him, in fact.

I’d sit there, slouched in my seat, feeling sorry for myself. Hating someone who didn’t know I existed; hating an entire group of people because I was jealous of them. After all, what did she have that I didn’t? That one over there, with the piano legs and the lumpy face?

I’d wonder what kind of life they had at home. Who cooked. Who cleaned. How did they spend their time after work. Would they talk at all. What kept them together.

I used to get angry to the point of tears. Once, I was in my usual posture, scrunched deep into the seat, staring out the window into the dark tunnel, and a man sitting next to me said, “Tough day?” I could only offer an ironic smirk and a barely audible “Yeah.” I just didn’t have the words for what was boiling inside of me. If I’d had said anything else, I would have cried all over him, snot, red face and all. And he probably would have offered me a Kleenex, and told me some comforting cliché like, “It can’t all be bad. You’ll see. Things will get better. It just takes time.”

The truth is that he was exactly the kind of man that would have loved a woman enough. Receding hairline, grayish hair, glasses, small gut hanging over his belt. And he was aware enough to see that what was brewing inside of me had started to seep out. I was embarrassed. Like no deodorant, no shower for two days, hold-the-bar-over-your-head-on-the-metro embarrassed by what karma I must have been emanating.

My first thought once I’d turned to face the window again was, “There was no wedding ring on his finger.” I wanted to invalidate the man because he wasn’t married, because he had seen my ugly insides, because he called me on it. What did he know anyway, a man like that? Because he was middle-aged, had hairy arms, smelled like a full day of work…and because he was right.

There was not a single moment of my childhood in which I didn’t consider myself to be an adult, and I associated adulthood with sexuality. My junior high sex education teacher tried to explain that children were not just “mini adults,” that their brain was not yet fully developed, their emotional and psychological state was not yet formed and defined. They were vulnerable to the influence of other people, and the impressionable part of a child could lead them to make choices that an adult would not have otherwise.

I sat in the middle of the class, sort of shrinking down into my seat, yet unable to stop myself from hearing her lesson. I didn’t want to stop, in fact. Everything to do with sex was so interesting to me that I couldn’t turn my eyes away from it when I saw it on TV, or when my girlfriends gossiped about kissing someone at a party where spin-the-bottle was the main show. It was a bad smell that I had to keep smelling, a circus freak that leapt out at me from all surrounding mediums, and I willingly let it in to my life and embraced it, against all warnings from those who thought they knew better.

It. I knew I had it, the destructive thing that it was. The beastly desire to feel like an adult and to be a sexual creature without even trying. It worked, because older men would always look at me, even when I wasn’t gussied up and sparkling. It was even worse when I was trying, because my mother picked out my dresses for me until I was halfway through high school, and she seemed to sense my womanhood approaching—it was hard not to, since I already had full breasts in fifth grade. Her reaction to that impending demise of my childhood was much more coordinated than when she bought me a Looney Tunes turtle neck with Sylvester the Cat prints as a reaction to my having gotten my period.

I was Lolita incarnate, and the flowery dresses, velvety fabrics and high-healed shoes my mother laid out on my bed only brought on more attention to my sexual self. For someone who was already developing the reckless desire to be normal and bland, these family outings to bar-mitzvahs and weddings brought out a strange mixture of self awareness and discomfort, like wearing wet cashmere on a hot day: thrilling, chafing, and not allowed in polite society.

Since it was the middle of the day, the apartment was quiet. It could have been a Tuesday or Wednesday—some day of the week that was indistinguishable from the next. They had skipped out on their responsibilities and escaped to the perch on top of the world. Snow was falling quietly on the city below; the roof of the Metrodome was a large, white puff of snow that never melted. Traffic was already sloth-like, and the two of them lied on his twin bed, wrapped in JC Penny sheets, watching their adopted bunny eating hay in its cage in the corner of the room.

And then the torment began. He wasn’t comfortable in the comfort. He started prodding her with questions, “What were you thinking? How old were you? Didn’t you realize what you were doing? Didn’t you see that he was just using you?” At first she tried to answer his questions, thinking that since he was a rational man, he’d be mollified with the honest, truthful answers. She was certain that he’d see she was still the same person, even in his fit of jealousy, that she was his first kiss, his first real love.

But he was lost, and no amount of reasoning would bring him out of the mood he was in. When he got that way, she’d try to stay silent. She’d try not to say anything to make the fight worse, or reveal anything else he didn’t yet know, because that too would become a jumping point from which he would launch his attacks on her. Perhaps not then, but certainly at a later time, at another sweet and beautiful moment when she thought things were finally looking up for them.

As she lay in the crook of his arm, snuggled up to his side, he said it. It was the most haunting phrase she’d heard in all her life, and she never forgot it. He wound up the bat. All bases were loaded and the stadium was full of spectators; cameras were on her, family and friends cheering for the winning run. And with a spiteful intonation, and the hint of disappointment in his voice, he struck the ball out of the park: “You are a broken mirror.” Nothing could have resuscitated her at that point.

She was swimming. She had a concussion, submerged under water, looking up at his hovering face, camera lights flashing, fading away at an incredible speed. He couldn’t have pulled her out. After all, he was the one that pushed her in, and would keep pushing her until she, one day, refused to climb out altogether.

Fall in Minnesota is a brief three weeks that comes and goes like a jealous man. When it first arrives, it’s the maddening blaze of summer and the shivering wind of a dark, northern lake. It cleans out old pictures, and shoves them into shoeboxes—a compromise to keep the photos from being thrown away altogether. It sets ultimatums—“you’re either ready for me or you’re not”. Memory boxes in closets, feelings jammed into the spaces under beds, jewelry boxes filled with childhood love, all evidence of a former life that cannot coexist at the same time as him. And when the season leaves, there is a smell of dampness in the air and everything is a color derived from a pallet of gray. Drawn curtains, unmade bed, cold floors, and the winter takes his place and settles in the way he never would.

“Why do you carry your baggage with you? Why don’t you just let go?” He asks her so forcefully that she forgets how to speak. She thinks of all of her moments of bliss, true happiness she’d had with Karen, Josh and Brian. High school friends, kids like her who were on the verge of something incredible—the life out there—something malleable and not quite defined, something that hadn’t been a disappointment yet.

When her parents would leave town for the weekend, she’d invite her friends over and watch movies. They’d have debates late into the night—Is being gay something you’re born with? Does a person’s sexuality define who they are? She’d relish being the center of attention, discussing existentialism after only existing for sixteen years, bringing out the fine liquor from her parents’ collection, but enjoying the taste more than the feeling of being tipsy. She’d lounge on the leather couch, and Josh would put his head on her lap. Brian, a friend she met at camp in ninth grade, would sit on the arm of the couch with his arm around her shoulders. Someone would say something hilarious and silly, and they’d convulse with such pure joy, that even a photo of them, stored in an album under a bed years later gave off enough warmth to keep her clinging to it.

She started college her senior year in high school. There was the pressure, as she saw it, to hurry up and achieve, to live up to her parents’ expectations. They came from a world of Russian Jewry, where if you didn’t prove to be twice as good as the next person, your chance at making a decent life for yourself was over before it even presented itself. Everything was always slightly out of reach for her parents. But for her, the world was a blank slate. America to her was a land of anonymity, a chance to be anything or to be nothing.

She was an anomaly, a mixture of a lack of desire and a burning, all-consuming belief that she was meant for something great. All through high school, she was the kind of person that followed her dad’s favorite proverb, “It’s better to seem a fool than to speak, and remove all doubt.” So she rarely spoke in class, and she was always on the verge of silent perfection, yet still somehow closer to the anonymity that normalcy provides.

Carpools to college that fall were an escape from the masses at high school. Getting into her car, which was on-loan from mom and dad, and speeding off to the adult world, separated her from everyone else her age. Josh would say, in his wide-eyed-wonder way, “Can you believe it? We’re big kids now!” Those sunny afternoon rides took them into a make-believe world, but what they deemed to be reality. She took Spanish classes, and he took French. She dabbled in astronomy and he tried creative writing, all of this at the expense of a state-run program for talented youth—money that was well spent, since it afforded white, suburban kids a chance to taste adulthood.

"Love is holy because it is like grace -- the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." How a woman was able to write this line, and make it sound like a seventy-something year-old man was saying it, and make me believe it, is beyond me. But she wrote the line, and she wrote the entire book, and I can't seem to get it out of my mind.

Love is holy. And it has little to do with the object of that love, but just about everything to do with the person feeling love. I have thought about this concept for a while now. It's been sort of rolling around in my head, knocking about, and it's part of the reason why I've started writing my thoughts down.

I don't believe in the idea of looking for "better." Often, men in their twenties do. Sometimes they love her, sometimes they don't know. Sweet things. Lost things. Unsure things.

Maybe Marylinne's point was that it takes a man seventy-some years to reach the same conclusion, the same Truth, that a woman reaches in her twenties. Exaggeration, I know. Because some women never realize this either.

If love really has nothing to do with the object of our love, but everything to do with ourselves, what does it say about us? What does the lack of love say? What about the phrase, "I just don't love you enough to get married right now." A void. Empty inside. No love to give.

Then, the "right" person comes along. And when you meet them, you just know it in your gut, right? Like Stephen Colbert said at the Press Corp Dinner in 2006, "I've got more nerve endings in my gut than in my brain." Like you've met your soul mate and God has brought the two halves together at last. It's fate, right? Wrong.

These ideas are so childish; I don't even know where to begin. I'm just used to eight year-old girls thinking these things, not grown men. The Little Mermaid turns into Pretty Woman when she grows up. And Prince Eric is really Richard Geere pre-business school. I saw that one coming.

Love is more about what Belle and the Beast went through. He trapped her in his castle. He scared her half to death and would snap at her. He separated father and daughter. Why? Because he had so much inside himself that wanted out. And he found his outlet--the refrain: the object of love really has nothing to do with the one feeling love. He seduced her, fell for her because she "was the one". Even the china, candelabra and clock were thinking this poor inventor's daughter would break some spell the castle was under. They chose her, and so she became the inevitable justification for their choice. The fascinating part was that the Beast really wasn't a beast. He let her go, after all. He was so content feeling that love within himself, that he didn't need an outlet for it anymore. She became more important to him than his own return to humanity, than breaking the spell. That is True love. It has nothing to do with the beloved, and everything to do with ourselves.

Before my Baba, my grandma, passed away, she pulled her daughter towards her and said in Russian, "You have to live life gracefully." Her brain tumor had been making her say strange things, sometimes inappropriate things to relatives and friends. She once started swearing like a sailor when one relative walked into her hospital room to see her. Baba said, "I never liked you anyway."

And when another relative walked in, Baba said, "I luff you, my sunshine," with her heavy Russian accent, and she stretched her big arms out for a hug. Her words were random, I wanted to believe. It was the tumor speaking; not her.

I held my breathe before I walked in to see her, not knowing what she'd say about me. That's how I've always been. Sensitive. Deeply concerned with what people think of me. And she reached her arms out towards me and said, "Come here, crasavitza, beautiful girl." And I collapsed into her, relieved that she didn't think badly of me, that she'd liked me all along, trully loved me even.

And so the debate within me was settled. I believed the tumor was like a truth serum that had somehow gotten into her brain. It's not that she was ever a woman to hold back what she really thought, but I took those words and that moment as proof that indeed, she really did love me, all walls broken down, hospital gown, IVs and food trays. She loved me, and wasn't affraid to say so. And that meant a lot to me. Because there she was, dignity sort of stripped down, hair unwashed, big scar and red stitches across the side of her head from where they had to perform brain surgery to remove the tumor, and there she was... telling people that she loved them, hugging them, telling them they were beautiful. I thought those acts in themselves were painfully beautiful. Graceful, even. And she was.