The Art

It’s the art of living everywhere and living nowhere.

That’s what my mama said today when I told her that I don’t want to renew my license plates in any other state but Colorado because it’s too much trouble.

It’s the art of being numb enough to feel nothing.  And leave everyone so that you feel nothing.

That’s what I told myself when I left Aspen, the first place that I ever did anything for myself, to go out into the Great Unknown, to find God knows what.

It’s the art of taking a deep breath and moving on.

That’s what my best friend told me the first time that my heart got broken.  And we sat together in the park.  And I looked at him.  And I felt a spark.  And I knew that’d we’d never be ok.  But that it’d be ok.  And that, by a simple twist of fate, it’d all be ok. 

It’s the art of knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. 

That’s what I told myself when I decided to turn my back on that little something real that I’d found.  Because I felt like it was a crime to feel too much at any one time.  And I told myself that we’d meet again with a simple twist of fate.  If not here, then on the other side.

It’s the art of telling a lie.

Just tell me a lie.  If it’s true. He woke up and she was gone.  He got up and put his clothes back on.  He got up and saw the note she’d left.  He got up and saw the simple twist of fate.

And I think about it every night when I’m wrapped up in his arms.  

Meditations With A Malbec

What do you do when you find the thing, at least a part of the thing; you’ve been looking for all your life?  If you’re me, you run.  You run far and you run fast.  You come to two proverbial roads diverging in a yellow wood and you take the one more traveled. It’s well worn and safe.  And you’ll never know if the other one, the one tangled with twisted branches and menacing shadows, would have made all the difference.

And me of the golden reputation.  The one who’s never home and never lonely.  The one for whom men supposedly fall so fast and so hard for that I’ve got nothing to worry about.  Ever.  Me of the golden reputation.  Me the breaker of hearts.  Me the taker of numbers.  Me.  The one who is alone.  And lonely.  Again.  With a fancy wine glass and bottle of Argentinean Malbec for company.  I toast to that.  The loneliness.  And drinking alone.  And nobody knowing all of theses emotions are dripping from each and every pore of my body.  It’s a good glass of wine.  Rich and complex.  Or so they say.

But I toast to the loneliness because the loneliness sneaks away, tail between its legs, with the first brush of morning.  The hurt does not.  And so I choose the well-travelled road.  The one most of us choose.  The one void of risk and thus, void of pain.  I could elect that road less travelled.  I could tell him how I feel.  For that matter I could tell my entire world how I feel.  But I digress.  I could tell him what I want and what I think about and what I dream about.  I could have the courage to show him this.  And they tell me that road less travelled would make all the difference.  And I raise my glass to that bullshit and say fuck that.  I’ll take the high road and avoid the hurt and pain that tears a body into so many confetti bits that a fraud artist couldn’t glue them together again to make a cohesive whole.  That kind of hurt means that one is never whole again.  And once again, I say fuck that.

And the one thing I want more than anything in the world is a connection.  To someone.  To something outside myself.  To something bigger than this.  And I have no one to call.  They’ve either told me they won’t speak to me.  They’ve cut me out completely.  Or they’re too busy.  Or they don’t understand.  Or they just don’t care to talk at this hour.  And why.  Because I’ve systematically eliminated everyone from my bubble of personal space in order to replace said bubble with an armored car of nothingness. 

But at least it’s safe. 

I’ll drink to that.

It’s a good bottle of Malbe.  Or so they say.

My Home On The River That Caught Fire

I started foaming at the mouth and chasing my own tail today.  I recognized this as an early warning sign of resuming wanderlust.  Shit, I really thought I’d make it longer.  You see I have a history of poor impulse control and a tendency towards erratic behavior.  But the doctors assure me that I’m not bipolar.  I just possess sundried and assorted forms of craziness and restlessness.

I am from Cleveland.  A place where the checkout lady at CVS calls me ‘honey’ and was there when I had to purchase tampons for the first time, underage beer for the first time and Plan B for the first time.  A place the humidity makes my cleavage sweat even at midnight and is about as welcome as a the middle seat on an airplane between two bulbous, perspiring 300-pounders whose beads of sweat are inching closer and closer to my elbows on the quarter-inch of armrest that is allowed me by their bratwursts of arms.  A place where people invite you in to sit down at their dinner table because, “Don’t you just know, this young lady was so nice to me today at the grocery store.  She helped me with my buggy.” (and yes we say ‘buggy.’ And sweeper, and clicker.  And if you don’t know what those words mean then you’re just not cool enough).

Cleveland.  Land of surprising ethnic diversity left over from Rockefeller’s days.  Not like Aspen, where you see a person who isn’t white walking down the street and find yourself wondering how they got so tan in the middle of winter.  Cleveland’s got the Czechs, the Croatians, the Poles, the Russians, the other assorted eastern Europeans, the Slovenians, the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexicans, the West Africans and of course the Italians.  Oh, the Italians.  I dated one once.  They make excellent lovers but terrible husbands or boyfriends.  Remember that.  It might serve you well someday.  They are the race of hair gel and tempers, rigatoni and knee-bending sex.  I will never stop missing inappropriate ass grabs from old men with gold crosses or the sort of overstuffed feeling that only copious canollis, everlasting slices of pepperoni and Grandma Marie’s urgings of, “Come on Katie, you’re too skinny, just one more slice of lasagna,” can wage upon one’s stomach.

Cleveland. A place where this hot mess of a world that we live in right now stares you right in the eye.  It’s my family friend’s face when they find out that they have a bun in the oven and no way to support the ones they already have.  It’s my sister’s eyes when she knows that she might lose the restaurant that is their income, their home and their lifeblood.  It’s the brittle little tear that drops down her cheek that’s already seen too many sorrows when she owns up to the fact that cancer is eating her husband alive and leaving her with two babies.  Alone.  It’s my brother-in-laws head in his hands to hide the tears on his lean, 200-pound high school football star frame when he hears that his house might enter foreclosure.  It’s a place where unemployment is 13%.  It’s a place where the pain of the Great Recession and the Economic Crisis are more than a trite buzzwords garnered from CNN.  It’s a place where these phrases spell a nasty reality.  That life’s hard.  Life’s a bitch.

And unfortunately for me fluttering free spirits with tendencies towards eccentricity and penchants for musing philosophically about the meaning of life, don’t get along so well in the school of hard knocks.  No time for that nonsense when the bank man’s coming to take your house. I got tired of this weight.  The weight of the Cleveland humidity sticking to my skin, even at midnight.  The weight of the problems in my loved ones faces wearing me down.   The weight of my memories dragging at the edges of my psyche. 

And so I’m headed West again.  It will be the tenth time my 2005 Subaru has crossed the country.  And I’ll rejoin comrades in our bubble.  Where this sadness is far, far away in a land called Cleveland.  The place where I’m from.  So don’t fuck with me because I’ve got a whole city behind me ready to kick your ass because us Clevelanders stick together.