“Well, that makes two of us,” she said. Her latte was getting cold. Irrelevant. She wanted a shot anyway. Something that would burn going down—something that would counteract the fact that he was still breathing.

“You’ve changed.”

“Not really,” she said. Could you get Glenlivet at Starbucks?

“No, Amy, I’m telling you. You have.”

He was insistent—straining to evacuate his brand of wisdom. Also, his hair was disheveled. His sports coat was wrinkled. His pants were too big. She saw all of his faults. They were widening minute-by-minute—enormous. The earth was splitting, jagged gashes threading through the concrete. Her entire universe was falling through that crack.

“Alex, listen—”

He didn’t. He went on.

She looked around, impatient. Maybe they stocked Hull Clean in the back. She could slip it beneath the whipped cream in his Cinnamon Dolce Frappuccino.  Like JD in Heathers, she thought. I’m a no-rust-build-up man, myself.

A moment (hour?) later, she tried again.

“Alex, listen—”

Nope. Not yet. He was still talking—still Imparting Something Important. Teaching Her a Life Lesson. He was three years younger. He’d lived in the same zip code his entire life. He still believed that if you pressed hard enough on anything, you could leave an imprint.

* * *

That had been six months ago. She had come to think of it as The Great Coffee Shop Scene. He had been patiently explaining why he was leaving her. His voice had been earnest, but still, monotone. He was being harsh. He said it was because she was difficultandhadchanged. The way he said it, with the words all running together, it sounded like an exotic illness. In fairness, at least one of those things was correct. She could be difficult, that much was true. But what did this mean, exactly? She was too easily hurt. Her heart was on her sleeve—which was a bad place to wear it if you were surrounded by people predisposed to bludgeoning bits of exposed soft tissue. So, okay. But that left one other thing: What was so different? Finally, he’d settled on this:

“Your hair color, for one. First red. Now fuchsia. It’s suspiciously indicative of something.”

She reconsidered. Maybe he was right (although the fuchsia was only a streak or two near the front). Maybe she had changed. Something more fundamental than her hair color—her perspective. He was a self-righteous asshole. She could see that now, whereas before, she couldn’t.

* * *

As a general rule, she didn’t have a problem with assholes. It was the self-righteousness that got to her—smug moralism. So, she tried a different approach.

“Let me tell you . . .”

That was the favorite phrase of her next lover. He started everything that way. “Let me tell you . . . ” and then he usually did. Something certain to get stuck in her head, taking up valuable disk space.

“Let me tell you! A locally brewed cup of Kopi Luwak in Indonesia is superior—I mean far superior—to whatever shit they ship into the U.S.”

“What?”

She had him repeat things—a reflection of her disbelief. Not in what he was saying but in that he was actually saying it. Kopi Luwak was coffee made from the droppings of a mammal loosely related to the mongoose. He might have meant “shit” literally.

Another example: She would say, “Would you pass the salt?” And he would say, “Let me tell you! If we were Kodiak bears on the archipelago, we wouldn’t need salt. We’d feed on wind-rowed seaweed and invertebrates.”

This lasted two weeks. In her defense, seven of those days, he’d been out of town.

* * *

After that, she joined a nunnery. In her head, at least. She didn’t actually join a nunnery, where they might expect her to take a vow of chastity, or give her body to God in a way that meant she could now only wear burlap sackcloth and deny herself chocolate cake and Kahlua. But she stopped talking. She prayed . . . things like, “God . . . seriously, what the fuck?”

She would go to the grocery store, and to work, and that was it. No more night life. No more men. No more lattes at Starbucks.

She died her hair back to its natural color.

She sat at home and meditated on the problem.

* * *

The problem was . . . there were too many problems. They stacked up. They did not get solved on a daily basis. There was a definite accumulation of problems.

She was all too aware of the result. These problems created risk. That risk was a shift from momentary dissatisfaction with life to permanent dissatisfaction. Irrevocable. And it was beginning to seem highly likely that these were the sorts of problems that could not be solved by people who were (a) unable to accurately clarify the true nature of the problem, or (b) those afflicted by chronic over-thinking, a malady whose main symptom presents in the form of creative problem projection (i.e., the worrying over problems that do not exist but could exist, given the correct set of variables. Such advance agonizing appears to deprive the problems of the element of surprise, providing the worrier with the illusion of cosmic foresight—a dangerous delusion indeed).

So, what was the solution? Amy thought long and hard about this. She thought the answer might simply be to acquire new hobbies—something aside from staring at the shadows cast by tree limbs against her white walls as the sun went down, her brain folding the day’s events into neurogami, or shredding it with nearly neurorgasmic glee to slender ribbons of confetti.

In this new light, she considered the following professions: basket weaver, goat herder, designer of winter coats for carrier pigeons, and topiarian.

“Five steps to uncover my new purpose,” excerpted (in full) from the tragically short journal of Amy, previous possessor of “suspiciously indicative fuchsia hair.”

Good morning, world! First step: Wake up. (Check.) Second: Take stock of one’s self in the mirror while brushing teeth. Note: New pimple. Under-eye circles appear to be expanding. Erratic hair growth. Crooked teeth. Side-note: Try to see positives. Revision: Ugh. Addendum: Try to see more positives.
Third: Eat healthy breakfast. (Black coffee spiked with Kahlua; top with fresh fruit?)
Fourth: Head off to work with a cheerful heart. Note: Google “how to + cheerful heart.”
Fifth: Whenever a problem is encountered, admire its construction. Admire its creative power to confound (and challenge). Delight in its complexity—or the breathtaking speed with which it is able to bulldoze through one’s sense of self-importance. Marvel at its perfection—the ultimate tool to creating roadblocks on the path to joy (or annihilating said path entirely, thereby forcing new course). Contemplate relativity: One cannot truly appreciate problem reduction without first experiencing problem proliferation.
Theory: Eventual love of problems in purest form will lead to enlightenment
(or higher level of delusional thinking).
Final note: Clearly, therapy is having no discernable effect. Recommend redirecting funds to cigarette/chocolate budget.

Note: The image included in this post was taken from iamboey.com. It is used with permission. I recommend checking out his site. His cup artwork is amazing!

If I renounce all worldly possessions and go live in the mountains with a goat, two chickens, and a two-year supply of canned adzuki beans and Jasmine rice, will my attitude become more moderate?  Reasonable. Temperate. Abstemious. My days could be spent making tools from stones. I’d hike down into the valley and harvest ash for splints and sweetgrass for weaving baskets. I would not speak, unless it’s to answer the wind. All of my hermit wisdom would be channeled into the goat and chicken, who will then give milk and honey mixed, or lay golden eggs.

Ridiculous. Obviously. But there are moments when renunciation is tempting. It isn’t so lofty though, this ambition. I make it sound spiritual, but there’s another element here. It’s called running away from reality.

My friend once told me, in between shifting gears in his car, that I remind him of a kid on top of a slide. This, of course, has nothing to do with caves, or pounding ash splints, or braiding sweetgrass for basket weaving. This has nothing to do with enlightened chickens, or adzuki beans, the latter of which he has probably never heard. I picture him cradling the phone against his ear as he manipulates the gearshift (“Hold on, gotta shift,” he says), but then he tells me again, about the slide.

“You’re like the kid at the top of the slide
holding onto the rails, and everyone’s waiting
behind you, so go down
the fucking slide already.”

Go.

Let go.

“Wheeee!” he says. And the suggestion is that, this is life. Right this moment. That moment at the top, when you’re quivering in fear. The time spent going down, and all that results: Life—with and without its share of golden balls. No need to escape to a cave in order to have our enlightenment moment. No need to shun society and the everyday experience, which includes things like standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you unloads two carts worth of frozen pepperoni pizza and hot pockets, then pays in wrinkled one dollar bills. It includes cleaning out the cat litter box. And going to the post office, and being cut off by someone on the outer belt. It’s about that person who isn’t calling you, or the person who is calling you too much. Most importantly, it’s about not getting your way, failed expectations, disappointment. Everywhere. Disappointment.

Resistance is futile. These things have to be worked out one way or the other. And you can hide from them all you like, but somehow, they will follow you. Even to the cave…where possibly your goat will die, or your chicken will deny you eggs. (How dare they! you think. Everything is a personal affront.) Maybe the weather will be bad. And there’s a musty smell in the cave. And the floor is still hard and cold, even though you’ve laid down a thick blanket of pine needles, just like you saw on Survivorman. Eventually, reality comes calling. And it is not always carrying a welcome basket filled with wine and mustard cheese.

Some people might like to tell you that, if only you change your attitude, you can Make It So. (“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”) They are right. And they are wrong. Maybe the secret isn’t to suddenly believe that you can manifest anything and everything you can imagine, if only you think hard enough. It’s hard to keep up with all the qualifications—or does it work on best intentions? (“God, please let the Browns win tonight, since I bet my rent money on them.”) I don’t know about you, but I can’t possibly think of every computation and permutation the universe might have in mind to service me. Believe me. I’m good at qualifications, and I’ve never been able to place the perfect order.

Or have I?

Perhaps there is an attitude change that neatly solves this problem. We accept whatever comes, and work with it. (In Zen terms, it’s ALL the perfect order, but I’ll be pretty grouchy if you tell me this when I’m in the middle of whining about something.)

We get shit; we make it fertilizer for the roses. Yes, this is lemons from lemonades. We accept that sometimes, things suck, and then we try to use it. Things disappoint us. And we don’t try to run away from it. That’s all. We just stop trying to run all the time, to whatever it is that we think will make us feel better…which in the end, always fails to do so. And why? Because reality is waiting, on the other end of that high. On the other end of the perfect fucking taco and cheeseburger pizza. On the other end of your hundredth pair of shoes or the new electronic gadget you bought, which you will hook into all the other gadgets currently distracting you from yourself.

Is peeling down to the rotten core always a bad thing? Probably not!  What a great way to encourage change. What better time to clean out our closets than when we’re overwhelmed by the stench of something tucked in away in one of those dark and cobwebbed corners!

So, right. Reality. I’m the girl at the top of the slide, who wishes she could be in a cave sometimes. The unknown is scary. But every curve in the road that took me to greater things started out as a shadowy, uncertain course.

Just a thought (I mean, in addition to the ones above):

Someone once told me that they tried not to have any expectations. (I suppose this is because if we expect nothing, then we won’t be disappointed when that’s what we get. It’s a classic defense mechanism. What we can’t control, we feel we must separate from or discard in order to protect ourselves.)

But what about this?

“Psychological health does not mean having no expectations; it means not being possessed by them. This makes room for lively expectancy. Such expectancy is followed by agreements that fulfill it or acceptance of disappointment as a legitimate condition of existence.” – David Richo

Could this be one of the things we’re running from? Disappointment? This very legitimate condition of existence? Maybe I will let go, and my trip down the slide will result in me overshooting the edge and dropping straight down, onto my ass.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Whatever.

I’m going for it.

She was lying on the couch when it struck her . . . staring at the terra cotta pots, which were mottled, their bottoms turning dark, standing out against salmon-shaded soapstone towers and bowls that served as her only concession to frivolous decoration. The color combinations made her think of Mexico—a casita in Chuburna done up in burnt orange and lemon yellow. Plus, Mexico always made her think of doors.

The plants were wilting again. They did this every few days at varying intervals . . . first one anthurium, then another. Their leaves sank down, staggered heads bowing to the slats in the rusting metal stand.

But this is not what struck her—neither the Mexican shadings of her pots and unconventional knickknacks, nor the silent message of need sent by the drooping foliage.

What struck her was the light—that moment, right before it begins to fade: sunset simmering golden liquid in summer. It striped her arms; it hinted at inner radiance. It heated her. She pulled away, and moved toward it. She twisted beneath it. A sigh slipped between her lips; the sound floated, vibrations transmitted in air.

That the sigh would have floated seemed incongruous. The feeling that birthed it was so heavy, by all rights it should have dropped, straight away, denting the floorboards.

Instead, the oscillating fan blew the waves down the hall.

*

For a moment, she wondered why she was there. She could see the question written on the face staring back at her in the mirror, her own reflection hung on the wall in the dressing room. The fitting area housed a corridor filled with bright red doors, matte finish, with silver knobs that seemed enormous in her tiny hand. On the outside of the door, halfway down, hung a dry erase board. The dressing room assistant, a clearly apathetic woman of sizeable circumference, insisted upon writing her name on the board, as if the identity of the person occupying the narrow stall were critical information. As if a relationship could be formed from this informality—she and the woman who noted that she would be glad to procure another size, or style, or color should the need arise. The woman’s voice did not reflect joy at the notion; her hand movements, while scribbling letters on the board, while unlocking the door, while hanging the clothes on a metal rail, suggested only a long-standing distaste for these tasks.

She did not call on the woman to fetch replacements. Instead, she dressed in silence, creating two piles—the one for rejections becoming the larger of the two. Eighty percent of what she tried on looked like it belonged on someone else—someone less innocent. Someone with friends . . . and a cell phone full of numbers assigned to ringtones that brought to mind triple axle hummer limos with neon floorboard track lighting.

The striped, half-sleeve t-shirt and cargo shorts were for someone more settled—someone with a mortgage, and a picket fence lined with rose bushes paced by a retriever who would match the golden stripe circling just beneath a middle-aged bust line.

She pulled her own shirt back over her head, then paused. For an instant, in that split second of darkness as the fabric shielded her eyes, she had remembered another time, another place. The thin black cotton had been a conduit for ghosts.

In another life, she had been trapped by the feeling of panic, which always seemed to rest beneath her brow. It was a beast in a small rectangle, set on its end. It paced its own stall, ungracious—yielding only in unconsciousness. When released, it tore the fabric of safety, bursting forward until her world was only a single breath drawn inward through a narrow reed. The panic would swell, spilling over as an ominous tide that surged until she was drowning, light coalescing to a vanishing point. Her heart was broken, and she feared the worst. It would race, like this, hooves thrusting against her breastbone, until she collapsed.

In the present, still confined by four narrow walls, she felt the need to escape. But from what?

There was only her.

*

It had first occurred to her when she was twelve. There had been no panic then, in the notion. She had been stronger for it. Something encased her; she was cocooned. Safe. She could walk down the littered streets of this enormous city—creeping in and out of the shadows cast by towering buildings, gated markets, trees, which were circled by metal bars—and no one could touch her.

God was

the sound of her footsteps. The brush of fabric. The high and low tones of traffic whooshing past in the distance. She could step outside, into the sea of life, and contemplate the components of bliss. Perfection would appear before her as the horizon appears to a sailboat: unreachable, but a constant, soothing point of reference.

People spoke, but the words failed to reach her. She could call out, in her child-like voice, but the sound would be sucked away.

Lost. (Sheltered.)

Each moment was empty. Clean. There were no echoes. In an instant, the sea could become a desert, a textured canvas, an unrelenting reminder of impermanence.

*

So there was that moment again. The sun sinking. The energy she’d had earlier, draining out of her, as if the last of the sun’s rays were stealing it away, carrying it off into twilight. She’d had plans—music at the café, or downtown, beneath the green awning on Market Street. Larger plans, fortune and acclaim—a steady stream of congratulations on her brilliance, the obvious vital nature of her opinions and their critical contribution to society. The beauty of blossoming creativity, the warmth she radiated, the inner calm illuminating her bones until she glowed and lit the darkness. These things rolled together; they flattened out; they turned light as feathers and blew away, until finally, there was only an acute awareness of the moment:

her eyes sinking down the stems of the plants; her muscles tensing, relaxing; she was pulsing, shifting, aching. Her fingertips brushed her skin; there was longing there, her own thirst bowing her head—the evidence of inestimable desire. She could read it like Braille:

Things might stay like this.

The subtext brought tears to her eyes.

*

But it was not going to stay. Nothing stayed. Already, change was surging, a violent oscillation. The colors were shifting. The sun sank below the treetops and gray-shingled roofs; it slid down the umber fabric of her pillows, over the curves of the couch, down to the floor, where it dwindled into nothing. This act of transformation, the movement from light to dark, would force her to stand. She would fill a pitcher with water. In only three hours, the anthuriums and pothos would lift their leaves, become a deeper green. They would demonstrate resilience; they would reveal the simple pleasures of being upright. They would take what space they needed, unfurling, uplifting, widening the Y of their stems like arms embracing heaven.

In response, she would turn on lights to banish the darkness. Music would supplant silence.

*

In truth, she could have been that woman—the one with the ringtones, or the golden striped t-shirt and cargo shorts; the one with a house, and a dog, and laughter ringing out into the hallways over the sound of running dishwater. The choice was always there—from this corridor filled with bright red doors, a universe: emptiness, or infinite space for creation.

The knowledge released her. Emergent. Safe.

God was

the spreading leaves of the bamboo, the failing light, the thirst that humbled her, her voice petitioning—

an unseen force.

Nothing was lost.

She could put her hand out, and there would always be something, somewhere, taking shape from the ashes.