It's easy for me to find reasons not to write. A couple of them are understandable but mostly they are stupid. And lies. Because the biggest reason not to write is fear. I am afraid that I am not very good. Definitely not as good as Fitzgerald, or Hemingway or Jonathan Safran Foer. Not as good as I want to be. I've tried several times to deny this part of me. To pretend that I don't need to write. I stop for awhile but I always come back to it. I get that itch that won't go away until I start again. So here I am starting again. Feeling a little bit like it's a fruitless exercise. A habit that'll never lead anywhere. But either way I have to write. It's who I am.

The Truth

I'm afraid of blogging.

It's something I should be good at. Something that's supposed to be so natural, it's paralyzing. Like forgetting how to spell an easy word when someone asks you paralyzing. Describe yourself in a job interview paralyzing. Trying to remember how to kiss on a first date paralyzing.

I read more than fifteen blogs a day and some of them are not better writers than I. But they have better clothes and filled passports and hydrangeas in actual vases on their reclaim barn wood coffee tables. And it's all real. The whole concept behind blogging is that it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you're a real person sharing your truth. These girls might have sponsors and family money and photographer friends but they are not models in glossy magazines. They really do have lives filled with the kind of glamorous things I love to read about.

My truth is not so glamorous. My truth is that I'm poor and not in a bohemian photographer buying film instead of dinner kind of way. I'm lonely and not in a gorgeously painful prose about a single cup of coffee in front of a rain splattered window kind of way. I'm lost and not in a hopeful I'm being reborn as a survivor of all this ugly stuff that happened to me kind of way.
I'm just poor and lonely and lost. Not in any romantic kind of way. The ugly truth is that I miss being told how beautiful my writing is and how brave I am for its honesty. I know that as a writer I get to pen what kind of story this is and I can tell it anyway I want. But if I'm telling the truth, my life hasn't felt like a story worth telling in awhile now. Not a story worth blogging.

                               I've been waiting all this time to be something I can't define.

    There has been a Format sized hole in my heart lately as I let one of the bands most influential to my life go unplayed for a while. Re- listening to this song feels like skipping to the end and realizing it was always going to be ok. It feels like full hearts and true friends and warm summer nights driving through the desert with the windows down. It feels the way I always did when I was single and I was spilling over with all the sweet pain of having so much love and no one to share it with, sure that the lonelieness would last forever and yet equally sure that there would be a happy ending. It feels like realizing what you knew all along, that feeling something messy and complicated is better than feeling nothing at all. That giving up on what you thought you were is how you find yourself.

The weakness in forgiveness.

In the hospital I am strong. I flex healthy muscles as I adjust pillows and blankets, fetch items out of reach of the bed and hold his hand when the pain peaks above a 7. I slow my pace to meet his on our short walks down the hall as I encourage him to go just a little further. My lungs fill and empty easily as his right one struggles. I know that for once I am not the vulnerable one and not just because I lack an assless hospital gown. I feel the blood pumping through a body that is whole and unbroken. I am strong enough to help him heal. It is just him and me and I am strong enough to lean on. I am strong enough to make him better.
     The strength fades with the chill of the hospital and melts out through my feet onto the hot concrete as I walk to my car. By the time I am shut into my father's Honda I am weak. I am alone.
      I try to think of someone to call. I don't know what I want to say exactly. My nail polish is chipped and I can't remember if it's been three or four days since I showered. I wish my Mom wasn't out of town. Even though Kyle is going to be ok this is hard and scary and more grown up than I'm ready for.  I crave the release of talking to someone who understands that a problem is not always meant to be solved and for the first time in my life I am short on girlfriends. A few I have lost to distance, the permanence of which remains to be seen. Others, casualties to the personality evolutions that come with growing up. And then there are the ones I haven't lost at all. They text me casually to keep in touch and I am angry. I have forgiven them before for forgetting me, abandoning our friendship in busy periods and then returning to it later like a hobby. I have forgiven them before because to me relationships are not a part-time job. I put everything I have into them and months or even years later I am still nursing the pains of the ones that broke. I forgive and forget or I get angry and get out. I'm not sure which one makes me weaker.

An Essay on Letting Go.

     I started doing yoga again to relax but when the flows are over and I lay down on a sweaty mat to come back to my breathing I return instead to the faces. I see the short red bob and freckled nose of my childhood best friend, the square jaw and strange Navajo tie of my piano teacher and the parted lips and light blue eyes of the first boy I ever kissed. My chest tightens and I feel the weight of memory and the stuffiness of the 95 degree room crushing me. I will never see any of these people again. I am starting to feel Closter phobic.

         In Greek they have a word for the feeling one gets when realizing something one once had is lost and can never be had again: saudade (sow-da-jee). I could never put my finger on how hard it was for me to let go until I discovered this word. It is not just a fear of change or a lack of fearlessness when approaching the future that makes me hold so tightly to things, even those that I have chosen voluntarily chosen to release. I can identify when a friendship has gone badly and I need to get out. I do not hesitate to leave a city when the time has come and I see the white space at the end of the page that signifies this chapter's end. I have chosen to let go of things when I knew that it was the right thing to do or that I needed to if I was ever going to be happy. I have chosen to let go but when the feeling hits and I realize the permanence of what I have done I am in panic. It is the finality of letting go that terrifies me. I want to hold on to the details about this person, or this city, or this thing that made me so happy and I realize that I am making a decision I can't take back. I often forget that by the time I try to let go, it is because there are only traces and memories of what made me happy left. I sometimes mistake the feeling of saudade with doubts about letting something go. I don’t want to let go of something without recognizing that I have already lost it and all I am holding on to is the ghost. There is no English equivalent to saudade.  

        I have always thought of letting go as losing something. Losing a place, a part of yourself, or worse, a person. I have never lost a person whose absence burned a whole through all the pages of my life. I have never had to wake up every morning and realize all over again that a person I loved is gone. My hardest loss was an uncle two summers ago but when I came home it was easy to forget him, to not notice his disappearance in a place where he had hardly been present. When other people I knew died I cried sympathetically, the way you do when you are watching a sad movie about a war that happened before you were born. I have been lucky enough to live a life free of tragedy. I do not know how to say a goodbye to someone that I have loved and consequently I do not know how to say goodbye at all. When there are no mountains to climb up, every hill feels twice as steep.

         I do not know what it feels like to say goodbye to someone you love but I can imagine. I have watched enough soap operas, read enough Shakespeare, and heard enough love songs and break up stories to be afraid. It was luck that kept me from losing someone I loved to the ground but often it was choice that kept me from loving at all. I knew I wasn't built for heartbreak. I cried when the stray cat we used to feed left us for good; how would I ever stop crying if I fell in love and he left me? So I didn't. I wouldn't admit to crushes and danced around labels like "girlfriend." I spent all of high school and most of college single and saved my emotional attachment for other things. I became inordinately emotional about friendships and interior decorating but never about men. When I finally fell in love I wouldn't even say the words out loud to myself for six months. He was a boy I had known for years and could never let go of. We have been officially together for a year now.

       When I was little I asked my mother what heaven would look like and she told me that heaven would be whatever I needed to be happy. I told her that heaven would be lots of big houses all on one street but they would be connected to each other by hallways and all of my friends and all of our relatives would live in these houses together. We would eat ice cream and watch movies and be together always without having to fly on airplanes to see each other.

            I still want this. I've tried to fashion my life after this childhood idea of heaven but instead it looks more like an attic in need of cleaning. I collect people. I add them to my life the way people add Facebook friends. When I am emotionally bored I stalk them. I click through memories finished with the filter of nostalgia and I let myself feel the pain of knowing that I can never go back.

I never let go of anything and while a temper tantrum in my teens resulted in the loss of all the cards and material items I had saved to the dumpster, the memories remain. If I didn't hold on to it because I'm sentimental, I did because I'm bitter. Courtney and Kate making up a song about me ripping a hole in my shorts at recess in the fourth grade. Not over it. My little sister Shannon getting a Tara Lipinski Barbie for her 6th birthday when she didn't even like Tara Lipinski and I was obsessed. Not over it. Getting "door privileges" taken away and having to sleep with it open for two weeks. Still bitter. The emotional weight I attribute to material objects is nearly as bad as that which I feel for the people who share their memories. I miss my favorite black leotard the way I miss the barre under my fingers and the feeling of being perfectly grounded with only my toes touching the floor. I miss my favorite shoes the summer after junior year of high school the way I miss the people I ran around in them with.

           Lately I have felt like I am carrying around a huge weight and my shoulders hurt the way they used to in middle school when I had a backpack full of books that I wore low on my hips because that was the style. I catch my shoulders inching up towards my ears and the ballerina in me is ashamed. One more thing I have lost. I am heavy with the usual senior burdens: trying to find a job, an apartment, an idea of what life I want after I graduate. People keep giving me the same advice, to be excited about all that lies ahead and all the possibilities I now have. I keep hearing that great things are coming but they are too far away to see and instead all I see is a blank page. The things that are not too far away, not just blurry possibilities are the people and things that I am losing. It is hard to let go of things you love for little more than a promise that you will find something to fill their absence. I am sad to say goodbye to the people especially. I am sad to see them go most because I have still not let go of the last set of friends that were supposed to be forever, the set that the college friends were supposed to replace. I find proof of the friendships I had in high school every day in memories and the emptiness of their dissolution in the silence between us. "We will all stay friends," my college friends say. No we won't. I think. I am bitter and jaded by finally having to admit that I am not friends with any of the people that I loved so much four years ago, at least not in the same way. Most of us don't even speak to each other. I cannot believe it will be any different four years from now. I will remember this month and these friends with the same fondness I always held but I will ache with the pains of loss.

     I don't understand how you can stop caring about someone who meant so much to you once. This does not happen if somebody dies. You never stop caring about them or feel guilty about never talking to them or have to decide whether to invite them to your wedding when you used to talk about them being in it. You are sad but what you had with them can never be destroyed. Your relationship is preserved exactly like it was, safe under the bell jar that comes from a forced permanent separation. This is not how it is with the living. Relationships change and fade away slowly. I don't know how to let go of someone without letting go of all of them, the good times and the laughter and all the things they taught me about myself. How do I keep all these things I was with you when you are not around? I don't know how to stop worrying and wondering and asking about you. If you don't care about me anymore, did you ever?

       I know that there must be a way to hold on to memories and not the people in them, to be content that these experiences were mine even if the people no longer are. I know that I should believe in the truth of past relationships even if they have changed. I know that I will still feel the fingerprints of the people I have known when they leave. I am graduating from college in exactly three weeks and there has never been a better time to learn to let go. I have no choice but to face that people are going to leave me. Whether I can find a way to or not the people I love are going to let go of this place, this life, and me and move on to something new. But I am afraid. I am afraid to lose mission beach and the boardwalk, the mission, Lestats all of my favorite places and spaces in the city that has been my home for four years. I am afraid of losing the faces I see everyday and their laughter, advice, inside jokes. I am afraid of losing the view from my rooftop deck or the perpetually sandy floors of my kitchen. I do not want to let go of these things. Every moment of happiness and celebration is colored with loss. I am happy to have known these people but I can’t stop being sad to lose them. I am lucky to have experienced this life but I am not ready to let it go. The part of it I will carry with me is such a small piece of the whole. I am sore from trying to hold on to everything as it runs away from me like a puppy on a lease but as of right now I have yet to let go of anything.

Just a couple things making me happy this week

Red wine in a pretty bottle

Easter appropriate flowers at the airport from the boyfriend.

Every picture of my pseudo-nephew Landon, but this one especially.

Yoga starting to bring back the dancer callouses

(sorry for the gross picture of my feet!)

This photo and this boy, always this boy.

Birds

I knew that birds flew south for the winter but I’d never thought that eventually they must fly back, and yet here they were. Hundreds and hundreds of bird silloutes appeared in front of the sunset. They rose from surrounding buildings like dust does when you blow on a shelf that has been left untouched for awhile. Joining together they flew in lines, one long ribbon into the northern sky. Another season was ending and it would be the last of this phase of my life. Southern California only has two seasons: summer and a pathetic excuse for winter. When the next season ends graduation will have passed and I will be an adult. I am terrified of the next season.

But I am comforted in the knowledge that some things will not change. Birds will stay in one place only as long as they are meant to. I watch until every last bird has disappeared to the north and the sky is blushed pink from the setting sun, and suddenly very clear.

*photo by me