Over and over
on leaving, on remembering, on trying on trying on trying
Why do crocuses even bother blooming? I kick the tufts of grass dotting my front lawn on the way to the door. It’s violent, boyish, and don’t know why I do it — to make sure they’re really there? To give them some tough love, because the world will be tougher? Because I care about them enough to hurt them? Because I’m trying to help?
The crocuses can’t escape me, no matter how nonsensically brief their time on this Earth may be. They are born and they grow and they die in a breath, and I document it all on my phone in bursts of shitty, overly-magnified 3x photos. I have shaky hands, so my pictures never look quite right, always messy in the wrong way, never as effortless as intended. It doesn’t stop me from trying, but I can’t seem to steady myself enough to improve. I carry gigabytes of mediocrity in my pocket. I say it’s for the crocuses.
In my head and in my hands and under my breath and between my fingertips, I do things I never speak about. I have been doing them on this sidewalk, on these front steps and walking away from these parking spaces and next to these crocuses, since I was a girl — a real, young girl in the most innocent and straightforward sense, soft and big-eyed and believing, with bouncy hair and tiny green-striped boots in the rain, young enough not to know better, young enough to be clueless. I’m not clueless now, and I fancy myself less innocent. Certainly less soft. But I still count to fours and sixteens and sing a nonsense chant under my breath, three times exactly the same, when I’m wishing for something especially important. I tap my thumb to my middle finger, then my pinkie, then my ring finger and back to my pointer; I do it the opposite way, the opposite way again and then the original. Rinse-repeat until I feel okay. Until my breath and my shoulders are freed and I can turn my attention to the task at hand. Until I can focus on the crocuses. Give them what they really deserve.
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I’ve been too busy to write and it kills me, because it sounds like such a lazy excuse. Maybe it is. I see a screening of Whiplash on a Wednesday night. I am not the next Charlie Parker. I attempt to re-read Mrs. Dalloway for some semblance of inspiration, but that would require a level of focus I can’t seem to muster. I try not to be too anxious about it. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.
I have a room of my own, sort of. I have money — not a lot, but something respectable, something honest. I am not the female Shakespeare. I’m trying very hard not to be nothing at all.
I read “Goodbye to All That” again and get defensive, again. I haven’t made it to New York yet; I’m on a long, long road. But I’m not as sharp or observant as Didion and nowhere near as sober, so maybe I’ll be fine once I get there. I’m not particularly interested in seeing through anything. I’d settle happily for swept-up and oblivious. I’d pay good money for broke and naïve.
Monumental things are happening to me and I have no idea whether I’m reacting correctly. March brought me gifts. Life-changing application results, ones that will, at least to the extent that any of this can, determine a solid, respectable chunk of my future. A health scare that won me black-and-blue arms from IV insertions and blood testing, a good dose of shame that still aches, dull and gnawing in all of the ways that shame is, and a towering mandate to take care of myself in a manner I’ve neglected for over a year. A flat tire. A comically awful family reunion. Hard conversations — far more of them than I enjoy, in far too close proximity to each other. Far more of them than I feel old enough for. And the matter-of-fact, haughty assurance of harder ones to come — tacit confirmation, simply in the form of each day’s sunrise and sunset, that all of the biggest, brick-hardest realities I’ve been lazily anticipating are very much close and very much real.
I don’t like change. I do little-girl rituals; I haven’t innovated for a reason. I’m not good at healing. I’m not good at leaving habits behind. I am still soft and I believe, but now it’s messy. I haven’t matured; I’ve just been thrust into an outside too big and terrifying for green-striped boots and wide eyes, and I’m not exactly sure where to find the tools to handle it or who to ask. And I’ve been pretending for a long time that I understand more than I do; I’ve been pretending I’m able to take care of myself, that I have the levelheadedness and poise and foresight to make the pro-con lists and weigh the options, that I’ve developed just the concoction of healthy, well-adjusted personality traits necessary to make a real decision and follow through with it.
But I’m a liar and a bad one. I tap my fingertips in fours and walk in straight lines and fail, and fail, and fail to leave any of it be. Who am I to imagine I’ll be able to leave?
At night, I think, I’ll trip over it all. I’ll flee home to my parents’ bed. Nothing I’ve done thus far provides any logical, empirical comfort; no precedent is set, no pattern established. I’ve given myself no reason to expect anything more.
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Tonight I’m throwing a party. Tonight I’m doing everything right. I’m putting up string lights and I’m picking up the pizza. I’m smiling and I’m wearing a dress.
All my life, the thing I’ve been complimented on perhaps most frequently is my independence. And that’s really, very sweet and perhaps warranted, maybe earned, except that I’ve never actually needed any. It’s very easy to stand up straight and puff out your chest and speak clearly and keep a straight face when you’re on a playground, when nothing is sharp or hard and someone is always waiting to catch you. But right now, today, I can’t touch the monsters. And the sand isn’t food and the stakes aren’t real, and I think I’m humiliated.
I will buy the flowers myself. I will repeat the phrase “I’m trying” until my throat is hoarse and numb, until no one is listening, in my room, on my own. I will read Didion and hate her for being cruel and being right; I will tack posters of New York on my wall and wait patiently for the day I get to go home. I will host a party and pretend I’m sure; I will put one foot in front of the other if it kills me. I will leave. I will grow. And I will write, I promise — I will write until it’s warm and write until it’s cold again, until I crawl home and until I walk out haughty and tall. I will write, I will write, I will write, until I have something to say.
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