A Note for my Friend

That was the joke back then: “your hair is full of everyone’s secrets.”

It’s true, I suppose. I happened to have a not insignificant number of people choosing to confide in me. It was a two-way street, though, and I suspect the joke came about largely because I happened to share horribly intimate things first. And maybe that was all inevitable in college, where you find yourself in a bastion of vulnerabilities and unendurable desires to express. I can’t explain, nor do I want to, the magic of that moment that lasts for four rushed years. It is a moment of pureness and honesty. It is a moment wrought with All That Could Be and imbued with all of the love inside of us, begging to be placed unto someone.

Once over, that Moment became an itch across my body and across my soul that needed to be scratched. I was only tangentially aware of this intimate truth, and became fully aware of it at 10:17 on a Thursday night, just 43 minutes away from the end of my shift at a suicide helpline.

After 52 hours of training, I was deemed qualified to volunteer at a wonderful organization with a broad impact. For four-hour shifts at a time, I sit and answer calls or chats from people whose problems range in a diversity akin to the people in this world.

I’ve noticed that one common thread seems to tie them together. It’s not the mortgages or the job losses or the deceased relatives that keep them calling us. It’s not the mental illness or the time spent in jail or how fucked up a person can make her own life. It’s not the physical handicap or the pressure to succeed and inability to actually do so or the divorce or the depression or the brother who killed himself a year ago or the rape no one believes happened or being transgender or the impossible to diagnose knot lodged firmly in the pit of his stomach. Those are only ever the reasons my callers talk about around the Point. Because the point is that they feel like what it must feel like to be inside a glass cage and bang and scream for the people standing mere inches away from you on the other side of the glass but still not be heard. The point is that they feel more than alone — they feel the awesome weight of believing the world has given up on them.

Sometimes my callers are subdued. Sometimes they are hysterical. Every time, I am raw.

And they are just that — My Callers. They’re mine for 5 or 10 or 30 minutes a night, all mine. Without fail, the 30 seconds preceding a phone call, a prescient pulse of nervous energy courses through me. Then the phone rings, and as my hand reaches for it, the world around me melts and I know I am about to do what I was made to do, what I become my best self in doing. I say the standard greeting and the world becomes smaller, while my awareness simultaneously expands to fill the void between the boundaries of What I Know and What Exists. Most callers barely share anything discernible. They just need a voice, a presence, to travel through the ether between the air we share upon our receivers and attach them to Life. Our calls become undeniably intimate. It’s me and you, and the beautiful, awesome human instinct to survive. It is instinct made more powerful by the fact that we share it. You want to survive and I want you to as well. So let’s share the silence like lovers hold hands and intertwine your story with my world like the strands of a braid.

Then the call is over and a spell is broken as immediately as it was created.

There is a line so fine, it is often crossed easily by mistake. The same quality that makes My Caller so intimate to me is the very same that can turn our moment into a mere exercise. The line between reality and abstraction is so fine, that it nearly breaks your heart when you hang up the phone and realize you just spoke to someone who is so desperately unhappy that taking one’s own life feels easy. Suicide is not an abstraction. Suicide is what happens when Misery overcomes the hardwired human instinct for Survival. That person to whom you just said “take it easy” before hanging up is not a case study of sorrow. That person is as real as any pain you have ever felt.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes sustains life for another day. Ten minutes of feeling a shred of companionship.

So tell me, my dearest friend, what it was that you were so upset about, you who has people who make their care known in ways big and small? Tell me how it is you lost sight of the thing that pre-exists all of our perceived successes. Tell me how you forgot that my hand is ready to hold yours, my ears to receive your words, my heart to reflect your own, and tell me how you forgot that none of the rest of it is possible or relevant when you are deciding if your life is worth living.

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It Should Be Easy

It should be easy, but it isn’t.

Let me amend that. There’s a difference between existence and living and the trick is to not conflate the two. You cannot for one second assume that living—this gerund of a word—is the same thing as the mere and simple noun of existence. Existence, surely, is the purer word form. It is what it is. A noun. Floating. But living, that’s some complicated business. Sure, it’s related, by being a noun. Yet it’s a noun derived from a verb. It is a form stemming from action.

Who really remembers the grammar they learned diligently in high school? And so we conflate the two, and we assume to live is to exist and that existence is a life. We think living is easy. But it is existence that’s easy. Breathe in and out. Take in nutrients. Maintain a level of hygiene. See? Easy. Nounish.

I need human contact all the time and I need to be alone. I love getting lost in my thoughts and I crave to break out of my mind. I give myself to people entirely and I can be so damn cold when I shut them out. I am sensitive and I am sarcastic. I want to be present and I relish reliving memories. I am tiny and I am strong. I hate when people play with my hair but I cannot stop twirling my curls. I value words most and actions always make me trust more. I want the lightest and heaviest in people.

Now forget all of what I just told you because a series of colliding contradictions cannot possibly elucidate the nature of a person.

Here is what I have come to know: the things that matter are verbs.

When I was two, my parents divorced. I didn’t see my mom for four years because my father hoarded me. But then I turned six and moved across a continent and an ocean to live with her in the Land of the Free. I started kindergarten and I liked a boy named Max, only I spelled his name “Makc” because I barely knew English. In fourth grade, I met a girl named Maxine and we proceeded to have dozens of playdates and I learned that one can be obsessed with a friend. I changed schools in fifth grade, leaving the isle of Manhattan for the substantially less cool bloc of Queens. A boy asked me out that year, and then I accidentally got him suspended, though the two are unrelated. A terrible hairdresser gave me a terrible haircut in arguably the most terrible years of young womanhood—6^th grade. But then when I was 13, things started to improve because I got into a great new school. Later that year, I dated my best friend’s ex-boyfriend and tried to figure out what dating meant when I obviously was not going to kiss him, well, ever. Then there was another boy in 9^th grade, and another in 11^th grade, and finally another in 12^th grade. My stomach learned a new growl, only related to that of hunger by a shared instinct of desire. Those were also the years when my hand never stayed flat on my school desk too long and giving the right answer in class became a thrill to chase. Writing became exhilarating. There was the time I ran to the computer lab in school to find out if I got into my top choice college, and then there was the time a few moments later when I realized I had and my friend next to me started tearing up, and I thought to myself her empathy was the bigger reward.

And that’s just the start. A world happened after that point. I picked up cigarettes, friends, and girlfriends. Groundbreaking kindnesses were spoken amidst plumes of exhaled nicotine. I kissed boys but wanted to kiss girls, and I learned to love taking a walk and indulging in the pangs of acute nostalgia for things impossible to identify. My music was constantly getting re-sorted into new playlists, and this act was and still is vital. There were moments when people said something so funny, or so flattering, that I begged my brain to never let the words go. 

On these things—on these actions slowly defining the flow of my life—you can hang your hat and say you know me. Because the nouns and adjectives, they really just prove the same point: they are changing. Their value lies in the fact of their transformation.

Living is most certainly not easy. It takes effort and time and pain and joy and reward and sacrifice. It is the constant flow of change, and the acceptance of those changes. Because to exist as I want to exist, to be the adjectives and nouns I have decided are worthwhile, I need to act. I need to live. I need to actively carve out my space in the air around me.

I am someone’s lover and one day she may no longer wish me to be such, but that does not change the fact that matters: I love. Her specifically.

I don’t know about being a Writer. But I certainly write.

Living is constantly becoming something. Something new or something greater. I hope that never feels easy.

Imperfect Love

On the eve of my 25th birthday, I can say that I physically feel myself growing up. I don’t think my height is changing. But I feel my mind expand and compress and expand again as it absorbs the weight of increasing awareness. I am unlearning idealistic love, replacing it with newfound knowledge of loving imperfectly.

I don’t mean to paint a sad picture of encroaching cynicism affectionately known as reality. I mean to paint a picture of beauty: in learning to love imperfectly, I grasp just how limitlessly one person can love another.

She came into my life as a symbol. She stood for strength and perseverance, for moving on and up. For freedom. I met her a mere two months after my first serious relationship had met the retrospectively predictable fate of a college romance turned long distance. Two months sounds like a short while in the shadow of one’s First Love. But the truth of the matter is, that first relationship was far from my first love. My first love was unrequited, as were my second and third. Three years of self-imposed pining had taught me a great deal about caring for another without an agenda.

I met her after I had proven to myself my self-worth and my ability to love another. I met her after I had proven to myself I can empathize and care selflessly for another. I met her after all the selfish points were made in my heart, and just before I learned deep, passionate, all consuming love does not exist in a vacuum. It is bombarded by the world external to the dense space shared between two lovers’ feelings and bodies. It exists under the auspices of happiness, for there can be no love in the void of individual happiness.

More and more lately, she comes to me at night agitated by her job, by the increasingly fragile confidence she desperately tries to project out to everyone but me. The world sees the woman I fell in love with, while at night I hold the woman I cannot fathom not loving for the rest of my life. She cries and yells and lies numb from the pain of struggling to make her life the vision she has of it. From the exhaustion of her emotions. I listen, feeling her aches, pulling her into me as if the only solution to her problems is melting her body into mine. Sometimes, when I gaze into her face, I lose track of her speech, getting lost in the most majestic almond-shaped eyes before me. Eventually her storm subsides, she curls into me and looks up into my face peering down at her. She smiles and I melt.

I do not love her because she hurts, or for the vulnerability that exposes, or for the intimacy of being her confidante. I love her with the greatest urgency in those moments because of the person shaped by a lifetime of tirelessly overcoming her own weaknesses and aches.

Sometimes, I am worn thin by her barrage of stresses. Sometimes, I want us to laugh. Sometimes, I want more attention and more time to talk. Yet I never demand. I never impose. I wait, absorbing the life of another being into my core as much as she will let me, hoping to overcome impossibility and make an individual feel completely safe in the unmoving company of another. She is not alone.

And it is in those moments that I feel growth of character. I realize then that it’s her turn now. A loving relationship is founded on equality, but it is an equality of feeling above all else. She can break. She will know I am waiting just beneath the wreckage. That is her prerogative. That is her knowledge to take for granted. For in order for us to survive, it is not sufficient to merely love. We must love in the face of a world seeking to weather us. In a world of crime and warfare and hatred and money and disease. We must survive as individuals first so that we can have a fighting chance of nurturing the dense space between us. A space full of something electric.

I think back to a night in the middle of a week in the middle of a lifetime of stresses when we walked down the serene, dark street to a school playground and decided to throw around a basketball. Our faces relaxed, our limbs moved more limberly, and our smiles emerged. Our gait regained its dignity. And suddenly the skies above opened and rain poured over us and the court we played on. I remember needing to pause for an infinitesimal moment so as not to disturb the game and register this moment as a symbol.

I am okay.

I am more than that. I am everything. I am everything because I decide to grab the ball and keep playing. Shoeless, drenched, tired. Someone said you should seek shelter when it rains, but my body craved the exposure more as it rained increasingly harder. It is in that moment of choice, of denying protocol, of heeding my animalistic instincts, of choosing to feel my flesh—in that moment, I choose to prolong the moment of happiness.

I used to think good things don’t require work. Follow the rules, and happiness comes to you. Perhaps that’s the line between childhood and adulthood: you get to take responsibility for your happiness. You are singularly accountable for digging your feet in the grit of the earth so you can stand upright with stability. Happiness does not exist external to us. It does not follow a paradigm. It is not a rule to be learned.

Happiness is in the choices I make. Happiness is in the freedom to choose. Happiness might just be that very awareness of the freedom we all too easily forget we possess.

I am everything. I am enough for myself. And I am above the circumstances of my daily life, not ruled by them.

I’m learning that you really can’t wait on happiness. It has to be an effort, and just because it is doesn’t mean that it’s not meant to be.

Loving her means weathering her moods. Loving her means pulling her tighter to me as her body convulses with tears. Loving her means effort. It means making her smile again. It means making her laugh and taking her mind off her pain. It means indulging her and offering advice. Loving her means feeling her lows. We must work to be happy together. We must work on ourselves as individuals, and we must work on making love prevail in our darkest moments.

So I’m growing up, it turns out. To love someone is not to fix them. It is not to be perfectly synchronized. To love someone is to possess the ultimate reason for carving out personal happiness. To love someone is to fight and not feel like that’s what you’re doing at all.


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