On Remembering

I remember her smile as she watched the hot air balloons rise above Stockholm at dusk.  I remember her giddy joy at ordering in a hash bar in Amsterdam. I remember how funny her silly denim overalls looked while standing in the middle of Vatican City. I remember her wiping away my tears upon hearing the boys’ choir in St. Peter’s Basilica. I remember the feel of her hand as she urged me into the Aiguille du Midi gondola to experience the high Alps in France. I remember her shaking me awake as our train boarded a boat on the coast of Denmark. I remember her embarrassment as we disrobed on a small beach outside of Ibiza. I remember her filling in the silences when words escaped me at the intensity of friendships found in Budapest. I remember her raucous laughter as I made my whole fish talk like a puppet in Piles. I remember our drunken flirtation with Italian men over a few bottles of wine in Pisa and how the tower didn’t quite seem to lean after that. I remember her winking at me when a man in Rome said I had the figure and grace of a ballerina. I remember her ease at meeting strangers at a beer garden in Munich and her love of Fifi the bulldog who didn’t speak English. I remember hugging her and feeling her shoulders shake at the airport in London. I remember our final good-bye, 10 years after that intense and long hug in London. Mostly now I remember how those memories and the regrets of her fill my heart with a certain kind of heaviness that these words cannot convey.       

Is it in Yet?

My friend recently asked, “When does a girl become a woman?” A lot would say it’s the first time she has sex. I say it’s also the first time she realizes that not every story has a happy ending. And in a young girl’s mind, that happy ending involves a man rescuing her from a life that society says would otherwise be shit. In a boy’s mind, a happy ending is...well, a happy ending. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

So this story is about when I first became a woman—in every sense of the word.

Enter Steve. Technically, he was my first love. However, looking back now, I’ve only had one and a half loves in my life and Steve was not one (or a half). I’ll write later about the real loves but that’s an emotional place and I don’t have the strength to visit right now.

After my stint with DJ in my tween years, I took some time to really find myself and to get over the “fiery” end to our relationship. So at 17 years old, I finally fell for Steve. He was a tall and lean lacrosse player with wavy dark brown hair. He had the biggest and clearest blue eyes I’d ever seen—they would sear a hole into your soul if you let them and boy did I let them.

I was a female version of Steve at that time in my life. I played lacrosse and the role of the nice, normal, sporty girl (with a splash of trendy 90s grunge). I decided it was easier to follow the flock while dying on the inside than it was to outwardly buck the system. I hung out with cheerleaders—although at 5’11", I was too “big” to be a cheerleader so I was always a bit of an outsider looking in (or looking down, as the case may be). Being tall came with issues, let me tell you. A simple hug became an awkward pseudo-sexual encounter when most friends’ faces were at my boob level. I perfected the art of the sideways hug for anyone under 5’7”. I also perfected the wide-leg stance that would shave off at least 3 inches. I’d probably have done the splits if I could.

As music went, I listened to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Cypress Hill. That’s right folks. Cypress Fucking Hill. Each time I hear “Insane in the Brain”—besides wanting to gouge my ear drums with a pencil— I picture Steve dancing and drinking Boone’s Farm in my parent’s living room. And because I know you’re wondering, he definitely had some gay genes in him somewhere. Again, a huge foreshadow to my dating life.

Our relationship was a normal high school relationship and was far less tumultuous than my relationship with DJ. I finally let a guy love me and I loved him right back, maybe a bit too much. As you’ll soon read, my treatment of DJ came back to haunt me on an unbelievably heartbreaking level. Karma truly is an evil, evil bitch.

I had a lot of firsts with Steve; prom, homecoming, smoking pot, making out after hours at the pool where I was a lifeguard. The most poignant first that I had with Steve is to be classified as the biggest first… disappointment… and one of the steps to being a woman. Read on.

I was 17 when we first had sex in my bed at my parent’s house afterschool on a Tuesday. The sunlight shining in was worse than being under a light in an interrogation room. Although, I’d assume in an interrogation room there would be a lot more screaming and sweating. My encounter with Steve was just the opposite—it was awkward, quiet, and quick. I can sum it up with the following verbatim exchange: Me, “Is it in yet?” Steve, “I’m done.” I know, it’s a cringe fest for me, too. Well, that exchange is very telling about how our relationship was to unravel—me waiting for something from him but all the while he was done. For being such a smart person, I have the emotional intelligence of a gnat.

So Steve and I went on to date for about 8 months. But to a short-lived 17 year old, those 8 high school months were calculated like a dog’s life and were the equivalent of about 4 years. The end of this coupledom happened during beach week. This is the week following senior year where everyone goes to the beach to celebrate their bright futures before heading off to college. This is also, ironically, the week when karma decided to shine its lovely rays of sunshine down onto my unsuspecting head.

So the day before we were all set to leave for the beach, I got sick. I mean, this was that kind of sick where your bones hurt and your eyeballs should be bleeding but they don’t because that would be too fitting. I was rocking a fever of about 104. I wanted to soldier on but my mom insisted I stay home and not die. She was so mean! I curled up alone on the sofa while all my friends partied and puked for fun. I thought my life couldn’t get worse. Boy was I wrong.

As beach week ended, I knew something was amiss. My friends were home but no one called to tell me how fucking amazing it was and how much I suck. I called them, they didn’t call me back. I called Steve, he didn’t call me back. This was before cell phones and home computers, so I was left talking to answering machines and lying parents—I know full well that Heather is home, Ms. Davis. Fuck you.

Finally, after a few days, Heather called to tell me to come over. She sat me down on her bed and proceeded to cry. And then she told me the heartbreaking news and much like my reaction to “Insane in the Brain”, I wanted to gouge my ear drums with a pencil. Steve had sex with a girl from another school. Not only that but he did it while my friends were banging on the locked hotel door trying to get him to stop. He did it anyway.

Steve never called me back. He took the coward’s road and let my friends tell me that he was an asshole. The rest of the summer was difficult to say the least. I had to avoid certain events so as not to run into him and have my heart broken all over again. My saving grace was going away to college, to a new land where Steve didn’t exist. But I suppose the karma gods wanted Steve to exist there, too—because within two weeks he sent me a handwritten letter.

The letter didn’t address his indiscretion, it just talked about how great he was doing at school and how he hoped I was well, too. Boy was I excited to hear how great things were for him! Thanks Steve! Do you want to pour salt directly into the wound or just kinda pick at it with a dull blade? I remember one line so clearly, the one that made me breathe a sigh of relief that we didn’t last longer than 8 months. He wrote, simply, “I’m kind of a big deal on campus.” So maybe karma isn’t a bitch in the end. Maybe she’s just a bitch in how she went about saving me from Steve and his overly-developed ego.

Looking back and knowing what I know now, that incident changed me and affected my life in a profound way and was when I became a real woman. It wasn’t about losing Steve and it wasn’t about the heartbreak of losing a first love. It was about losing the part of me who knew how to trust without reservation. That, my friends, can fuck you harder than Steve fucked that girl at beach week. Oh never mind, that isn’t really making my point because I assume she also asked, “Is it in yet?”

DJ Loves KD

David Joseph, or DJ, was the bad boy of bad boys, according to me—a pre-teen girl from the Virginia suburbs. At first glance, he was everything I was not but wanted to be; a perfect foreshadow to my entire romantic life. I can’t tell the story of DJ without telling you that it was the 80's—I was 12, he was 13. My memories of him are closely associated with the 80's: his music, his smell, his hair, his denim jacket.

As with much of my life, I can judge my emotional state by the musicians I emulated. That year it was a mix of Edie Brickell, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. You can imagine, to my mother’s dismay, I was not the 8th grade, cheerleader-to-be. I was, in her eyes, a few mistakes shy of serious jail time. I dressed in black and wore my brunette hair in a too-long, unruly, wavy, mess down my back. I was too skinny, too tall and too boyish for the boys with popped collars from the Gap. I was a rockstar before there were rockstars, or so I thought. I suppose a lot of this I owe to my father—he raised me, as the son he never had, on old school vinyl records and a brooding, edge-of-reason demeanor. I’m uncertain to this day if my father’s attitude toward me was his personality or a reaction to my difficult nature. Either way, it was, in one word…difficult.

Within a week of entering 8^th grade I’d heard about DJ—in looks alone, he was a cross between the Sex Pistol’s Sid Vicious and Dee Schneider from Twisted Sister. DJ made an impression when I first met him, as he did with most people. He was wearing chucks—5 years after no one wore chucks—full of stains and holes, each one telling a different but equally unbelievable story. Stories more suited to a 25 year old man than a 13 year old boy. His black jeans were painted on, his KISS t-shirt old and dirty, his denim jacket smelling of smoke, sweat and cars he shouldn’t be driving. His front left tooth was chipped, I never knew why. I suppose our discussions never focused much on the important things like chipped teeth and arrest records—it was more of a Bonnie and Clyde type of relationship. Subsisting on bucking the system and adrenaline, well, as much adrenaline as my 12 year old body could muster.

I don’t remember much about how it happened, but DJ and I were officially a couple within a few weeks. Our relationship generally consisted of late night phone calls (me on my Princess phone and he on the wall phone in his mom’s outdated kitchen), after-class chats at my locker, and secret meetings on the school playground. I say our relationship generally consisted of these events—but there’s a lot more to say there. Within another few weeks we solidified our bond with a real kiss—even just writing that now makes me cringe a little. I suppose that cringe factor is why, after 22 years, our kisses are burned into my brain and are still entirely too vivid. In theory, kissing a bad boy should be great, right? The passionate end of that reasoning was spot on but there was something missing. I can theorize now that it may have been that freshness of youth thing, I don't think he ever had that. I imagine he came from the womb with a cigarette hanging from his full lips, bleached out hair and a penchant for causing trouble. What's in a kiss, you ask? Everything. 

So after a few more weeks, 6 mix tapes, my first cigarette, a few stolen stopsigns, and many more cringe-worthy kisses he presented me with a symbol of his undying love and affection. I noticed this symbol as I walked up behind him in the hallway after 4^th period. There on the back of his denim jacket was the worst nightmare for a 12 year old girl who was desperately trying to blend into the walls. Scrawled, in hot pink spray paint, was…DJ LOVES KD. My heart stopped. Not in a good way like when my only real love first held my hand, but in a way like I just saw a clown killing a panda. All the kids were pointing at it…pointing at me, pointing at it AND me.

In retrospect, my actions following this show of affection were expected and lend a great deal of insight into my behavior over the years to come. Like any girl with early onset communication issues, I stuffed my feelings of disgust deep, deep down and held it in place with a huge brick of resentment. Instead of telling him it upset me or breaking it off with him, I ignored him. I mean, full court press ignoring. He disappeared into the walls kind of ignoring. Not enough sorries in the world could make up for it kind of ignoring. I didn’t know what else to do. I mean, I don’t think Nancy had to deal with Sid painting hot pink love notes on his jacket, did she? Did she? 

So I suppose I was happy dating DJ the bad boy and with people thinking, wrongly, that I was a bad girl. And as a nod to my fear of commitment, I kind of enjoyed not really knowing if he liked me. But to me, there was just too much wrong with the spraying of the jacket and the declaring of the love. First and foremost, Bonnie and Clyde did not show affection with pink spray paint! They just didn’t. I’m fairly certain I just read that fact on their Wiki page, by the way. Secondly, love? I was 12 years old. I barely knew how to love my cat let alone a man-boy with yellow hair. Finally, where did the bad, emotionally stunted boy go? Where was the boy that didn’t even tell me about his chipped tooth?    

I ignored DJ for about two days before he went all, “Say Anything,” on me.  He showed up outside my bedroom window with flowers—keep in mind he was 13, stole his brother’s car and drove 30 minutes to my house. Wait, how did he get my address? It was the 80's, you couldn't Google it. Anyway, I digress. My mom was less-than-impressed by this suitor. With all of my glorious, heart breaking strength, I insisted he was just a weirdo from school and she called the police. He ran before they arrived and things were fairly uneventful...until...the trashcan.

School became a bit of a messy place for me after I broke things off (using that term loosely) with DJ. He was everywhere I was. He was sad. I was skeeved out that he loved me. It was just a mess. It seemed to ease up after a while. He stopped coming by my classroom after every period. He stopped putting notes in my locker. Those events happened more sporadically and were less of a burden on my fragile emotional state. 

Then, it happened. I remember it was the fall because the air was so dry and so ripe for a nice, warm fire. Maybe not entirely safe for a nice, warm fire but that’s just what I got. I was walking to the bus after school and there it was. A large, metal trashcan—full of fire. Did you catch that? It was full…of…fire. The flames were high and smoke was billowing and attracting the attention of everyone that ever lived on this planet, or so it seemed. And there was DJ next to the trashcan with a bottle of lighter fluid at his feet. He was holding the denim jacket over his head… DJ LOVES KD… DJ LOVES KD… DJ LOVES KD…for the entire world to see. I stood there, mouth hanging open, black eyeliner framing my large, round, shocked eyeballs. I can’t remember much of what he said but it was heartbreaking—but no one could turn away. It was painful, emotional and... WONDERFUL (to everyone but me and him).  After what felt like a few hours, he ceremoniously placed his denim jacket into the fire and slowly walked away.

Souls of New York

I had a dream once. I was walking down an unnamed street in lower Manhattan, the streets damp from a recent rain, the air barely holding onto that clean smell that New York sometimes gets after a storm. In my typical fashion, I was walking slowly down the street, meandering a bit, looking down at the sidewalk and thinking about all of the soles that had walked there and all the souls that had passed by. I was breathing in the feel of those souls, the thoughts of them.

As is also typical of me, I was forming so many questions in my mind. What did they do and feel here? How were their lives changed here? Did they fall in love here, as I did? Did they get their hearts broken here, as I also did?

As I walked, I felt a familiar feeling of warmth, even in the briskness of fall. Slowly I lifted my head. There you were, walking toward me with a beautiful woman. My body registered the shock I felt as my heart fell and my breath became shallow and my eyes began to water. That kind of watering that if you blink once every tear in your soul will come flooding out. I looked down and composed myself and looked back up.

At that moment I realized how much I truly did love you. That kind of love that doesn’t falter, even after you’ve moved on and found someone else. For with that glance, I realized that I wasn’t disappointed to see you with someone else, I was warmed to see you so happy. I saw less of the two of you and more of your face, your expression. There was so much love there as you laughed with her and held her close to warm her from the chill in the air.

As you turned forward and saw me, you stopped, surprised. That surprise gave way to a huge smile. A smile I remembered well, a smile I saw quite often and heard even more often on our phone conversations across the miles. We both walked forward, your smile never faltering, your arms now outstretched. You happily said my name, and how great it was to run into me, hugging me and enveloping me like you always used to.

When I awoke from that dream, I still felt that familiar feeling of warmth. But this time, something was different. That final hug in my dream, which represented our new reality, was more of a good-bye from a big brother and less like a hopeful embrace from a lover and a friend.