Sweet Dreams

I had sweet dreams about Philly...

I had fantasies about one of those colorful little walk-ups in Center City. The ones with no real front porch to speak of, pressed up close against one another like patches on a quilt. I daydreamed about a house full of animals and dual office spaces. A living room designed with an artist's touch, my favorite color paint on the walls. I loved that patina of city with a slower pace; the gentler expectations in the midst of ungentrified grittiness that city offered. With space...finally enough space, and my own expert tour guide.

I longed for San Francisco…

Holed up in Oakland, short commutes on the BART to and from those activist workplaces. Dinners with the sister-in-law on long, slow nights and walks through the fog, no particular destination in mind. Stuck on the Golden Gate, all dressed up with no place to go, hours of gorgeous conversation swimming in warm Osento pools.

I have, on various other occasions, dreamed up London, Italy, Durham, Woodstock, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Savannah, and D.C. In these fantasies, there is always a someone else…A someone else and a conflict-free diamond ring and a warm, safe home. It makes me cringe to admit that; what I want for myself seems so cliché…so average and run-of-the-mill. It’s humiliating for me to realize that what I want is so simple, and yet I can’t succeed in getting it for myself. Although not for lack of trying…

Brooklyn was my dream. In my head, it was always me, alone in my bright little apartment, cats skulking about underfoot while I wrote, costumes prepared for the evening’s show. There was never a somebody else, just me…This dream was mine, and now I am tired and uninspired and unsure if I even want it anymore. What do you do when the reality of your dream is empty…when you don’t want the life that you’ve made for yourself anymore.

I feel spent…worn out. Right now, the lights of this city don’t inspire me like they used to. Change doesn’t inspire me. Love doesn’t inspire me. These things make me feel tired…old, afraid.

Life doesn’t have enough romance. And I’m not talking about the kind you have when you meet someone that you’re crazy about. I’m simply talking about the kind where you accidentally catch a view that makes your heart stop, or have a café conversation that makes you laugh uncontrollably. Living life deeply, feeling grateful and alive, that is romance. Being in love with life. I am trying to fall back in love with my life.

I wasn’t sure where to start, so I thought maybe I should start at the beginning…back to the basics. I painted my walls. I called my sisters. In a few days, I’ll head home to sleep in my parent’s house for a bit. I laid on my bed with my cats, quiet as they were. I downloaded Wynton Marsalis’ album of standards and listened to the entire thing through.

Angst has been in vogue for far too long. People think it’s ridiculous to be happy, to be content. We’re just conditioned to be jaded, to always need something else. But I’m ready…I’m ready to be happy and safe and quiet…and content.

I’m taking the month of August off from performing. Probably the month of September, too. And who knows where I’ll be after that. In the meantime, I’m here, behind these headphones, learning to rewrite my own name…

Nothing But...

I took it down.

Honestly, the shit storm surrounding my In The Fesh piece was exhausting. To be honest, I feel a sense of relief at having relented to the censorship. It’s much easier on my heart knowing that I retreated, that I retracted all of that glaring truth and raw, bleeding honesty. That kind of intense disclosure makes me sick to my stomach…too much truth at one time. It’s on YouTube for the world to watch, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it.

Honesty is one of those unfortunate things that people always claim that they want, but in general, they want the truth as a customized version of reality. They want to hear truth when it suits their needs, matches their desires…everyone likes to hear the truth when it favors them. What I realized is that everyone has their own calculated version of the truth…the truth that they want to know. The truth to you is not my truth, and my truth is only as honest as I can be with myself.

Honesty takes bravery. It takes the power of conviction, of being able to stand alone, in your own corner when people ridicule you, accuse you of being manipulative and calculating, leave you behind…I am not that strong. When people ridicule me, I question myself. When they accuse me of being manipulative and calculating, I believe them. When they leave me behind, I cry for the ache in my heart. I would be more honest it if didn’t expose the most fragile, vulnerable parts of me to the firing squad. I am stricken by the same proclivity toward self-preservation as the rest of the human race.

A few weeks ago, Emily Gould wrote this article for The New York Times Magazine. It’s basically a short memoir of her time spent blogging, both personally and as paid work. As someone who also does both, this article resonated with me, both for the ethical issues it brought up, and because she articulated some of my own ambivalent feelings about the nature of blogging.

Like, for example, if you write something pertaining to someone else, and they ask you to take it down. In her piece, Emily recounts an experience where she posted a funny comment her then-boyfriend had made. He didn’t like the way it made him seem, and asked her to take it down. She balked. He became defensive, she felt censored.

Blogging is anonymous…on so many levels. You, as my readers, are always anonymous, peering in from behind screens and only making yourselves known through the occasional comments of your own volition. I write about myself, however I’m free to reveal as little or as much as I want. I have become adept over the years, of being vague…to give a general sense, a jist, but without divulging any relevant details. You will know in excruciating detail the way that my heart aches, but you will never know exactly why.

Blogging is not a relationship. In a relationship, people come together and ostensibly reveal themselves to one another, layer by layer, like peeling onions with the requisite tears. At best, blogging is me writing about the things that are important to me while a mostly-silent audience of readers supports me by keeping my traffic stats up. At worst, blogging is a group of anonymous voyeurs lurking in the safety of cyberspace, titillated by the splatter of my emotional histrionics, my acting out being the same kind of twisted attention-seeking as Britney shaving her head for the papparatizi: doing it because I know people are reading.

On one of the first dates I went on with my last girlfriend, she asked me about my online presence…art vs. life, intention vs. interpretation. Back then, I had a much more pragmatic view on people’s perception of me: let them think what they like. I can no more control people’s opinions of me than a painter can dictate what her audience reads between the brushstrokes. But I also had a rule that I would never write about experiences that involved other people unless they consented to it beforehand. I never wanted people to feel vulnerable or exposed with me, like anything they said would be repeated or that confidences would be betrayed. And for the most part, I kept other people out of my blog posts, until the last one.

And even then, it was how I felt about these people…the things I fantasized about. No one is implicated in the lustful wanderings of my mind. No one but me…

Over the past few months, I have turned to this blog as an outlet. Sadness is the land of the lonely, and every time I am sideswiped by the bitter blades of heartbreak, I start to feel like the last living girl on the planet. You always feel as if no one has ever been through the pain that weights your ankles. Blogging, even vaguely, about what I’ve been going through makes me feel connected to something…some sort of universal consciousness. Because if just one other person can read my writing and know exactly how I’m feeling, then I’m not alone in this. Then I don’t have to feel so alone.

I have always been the kind of person that needed to process externally. The world and all of the people in it act as a million little mirrors, reflecting my behaviors and emotions back to me in a way that I hadn’t seen them before. I understand myself better while looking through the eyes of other people. Not everyone is like that, but I need to see what you’re seeing. Because from in here, none of me makes sense.

I suspect that everyone feels that way sometimes. This is my way of reaching out. Of showing you the vulnerable, hurt parts of me so that you know, if you feel that way, that you are not alone. That’s all I ever want of my writing…I want people to relate to it.

Ethical issues and emotional histrionics aside, it’s so hard to connect with people. And the older I get, the harder it becomes. So if a designed template with some words filled in can open up two people to the possibility that they aren’t such strangers, then I will resume my place in the blogosphere and continue to press fingers to keys...

In This Day...

I’ve been working like a crazy person…

I know I’m lucky. I feel lucky. There are a million unemployed dancers in this city who would kill for a paying gig, and I’m not sure how I lucked out, but I did. And much like I do when I feel like I lucked out, I intend to capitalize as much as I can before the deal runs out. Because the deal always runs out.

I’ve been dancing since I was 2. I’ve been dancing almost as long as I’ve been walking, and it feels just as necessary, just as fundamental a part of me. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of losing sight of myself, of stumbling off my path, of getting caught up in all of the things this seductive city is tempting me with, dancing is the only thing that can bring me back. The only thing that can help me shut out the noise around me and hear only music and my thoughts.

That’s why I love these go-go gigs so much. I don’t have to care who’s watching, who’s seeing. Being a go-go dancer is about the equivalent of being an undulating piece of furniture, insofar as people pay attention to you. I just let myself do what I love and get lost in it.

I have been searching, looking for myself in every corner for the past 4 months…wondering how I got where I am and what I can change. I have trekked to the hot bayou of Louisiana to commiserate with the brooding doctors of philosophy, picked their brains for morsels of meaning and motive amidst the haunted soul of New Orleans. I have flown to the laid back coast of California to seek the advice of tattooed psychologists and hear the stories of activist lawyers stricken with wanderlust. Every single word has left a track mark on my heart. These amazing minds, passionate hearts, they make me crave meaning and a reason.

I have opened my eyes wider, and I have cried harder. I have told so much truth that it makes me sick to my stomach. I have sought refuge in camera flashes and under the tattoo artist’s needle, and I have tried, really tried, to hear what the world is telling me.

And I have been forcibly resisting the part of me that says

|you weren’t worth it. You weren’t worth fighting for. You weren’t worth the struggle of working through it, and that’s why you’re alone.|

I am desperately trying to stifle the part of me that believes that love should be able to bring down the walls we build to keep us safe. That if you have that, then it’s enough. Because it isn’t enough. People throw rings at situations and casually toss around the word “marry,” and my heart just breaks. Frozen in liquid nitrogen and shattered against the wall…

I’m fucking sick and tired of begging people to work with me, trying to prove that I’m worth whatever level of bullshit needs to be slogged through. I’m sick of trying to explain to people that sometimes you have to fight a little for what you want; that you can’t give up at the first sign of struggle. I mean, of all the shitty, painful, wicked, ridiculous, trying, heartbreaking, and stone cold horrendous things that we experience in this life, isn’t loving someone worth fighting for? Isn’t love worth fighting for?

The tattoo on the left side of my body says “Born With A Broken Heart,” but the plan has been, all along, to get a matching one on the right side that says “Fighting For Love.” Because for better or worse, that’s what matters to me. Some people believe in God, some people believe in philosophy or science…I believe in love. And that doesn’t make me naive or misled or delusional. But maybe I’m just more hopeful in a world that is always prepared to kick our teeth in.

“Love’s freedom fighter
a renegade, felonious writer
so go on and grip that heart a little tighter
I want to see those knuckles a little whiter.”

That’s who I am. When the world is shut out, and the music plays and I’m dancing, that’s exactly who I am…

walk.on.

Spring has very delicately begun to wrap its fingers around the throat of this city. Someday soon we'll wake up, gasping in the full-blown choke hold of the summer. But for now, the warming afternoons and lengthening evenings are just edging in on the periphery of our minds.

NYC is like night and day from the cold months to the warm ones. My bestie says that we have to live it up through the heated times, at least enough that those memories can sustain us through the harsh cold of winter, slogging through toxic sludge to get to work.

I walk through the city, feeling like I just woke up, noticing people begin their languid, lustful motions toward one another. It starts with a laugh, a touch, a long glance, and then gradually blooms into the Springtime rituals of those haphazard picnics and drowsy walks on lazy Sunday mornings after sleeping in. I watch people's lids, heavy with anticipation, drooping gently over sultry eyes.

And I start to feel like an anthropologist, sent to observe and take detailed notes. To publish my accounts on blog after blog but never to engage with my subjects. I was sent to watch, like a sticky-fingered child with her hand pressed to the window of the pastry shop. And, oh how beautiful everything looks through the glass, those candy-coated hues and glittering sugar.

I feel a happiness for these people, their little desires fulfilled. I feel a happiness that I celebrate in tears, a selfish acknowledgment of my own loneliness, the gaping void in my own life. They begin to slow their pace, carving room in evenings for these simmering affairs, and mine picks up. I walk faster, work harder, so much work on my plate that I can’t keep up. Weeks spent bent over computer screens, 55, 60, 65 hours spend grinding away. My bank account is stacked, but what the fuck does it matter? What is money and a career and a steady stream of gigs when there is no one to share it with?

So I let my mind wander and I am surprised to discover what a traditional girl I am in some ways, my fantasies veering toward the most basic of romance. Yesterday I bought an emerald satin jewel of a dress...I haven't got any place to wear it, except maybe on stage, but I imagined the life it might lead in the oppressive night heat of this city: slow-dancing to Miles Davis on a rooftop somewhere, the summer sky stretched out overhead. I pictured an open bottle of red wine, my bare leg draped casually over the lap of an imaginary other person, stories of European travels being exchanged in quiet voices. Loaded glances from across rooms full of oblivious people. Hibiscus flowers, carefully preserved and wrapped, brought to my doorstep to be worn in my hair. An arm wrapped around my waist, with careful and strong fingers at the small of my back...That inner charge that comes from knowing you want and are wanted in return. That feeling of sheer euphoria that emerges from the understanding that, despite all the people there are to look at, you are being seen.

It sounds like the teenaged longing of a girl left behind. The smart girl that works too hard, studies instead of having fun. I work these long weeks, charging through tasks and jobs with the passion whose true calling has been thwarted. I push myself right through to exhaustion so that I don't have to think...I can just let my worn out body take the lead and put me to bed. I feel like Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shouldn’t I Have It? Shouldn’t I, at 26 years old, be in my prime of Having It? Don’t I deserve to indulge in these little exchanges, these moments that spark in the dark? But these little romantic notions are entertained in my head, and when they don't present themselves in my waking life, I take them to my stage.

That square of space that, for 3-and-a-half minutes at a time, is my domain. My own blank canvass for whatever romance I decide I want to cultivate. I imitate Italian princesses with bright flowers tucked into my dark hair, and walking down 14th Street, post-gig, at 1 am, people tell me I look beautiful. I channel the tragic heart of Cleopatra in my blacks and reds, born to be betrayed by love. I pay homage to Billie Holiday by throwing my head back and singing the blues with lips painted bright red. My body tells the whole story, and for those 3-and-a-half minutes, people watch. For those 3 minutes, I am really seen.

It makes up for the rest of the time, when I’m just the girl on the street…one of 8.5 million, walking to work on hard trodden soles with a dream in her head.

Gimme More

Burlesque has been very lucrative for me recently.

I am nervous even as I type this. I’m a superstitious person…I believe in jinxing your good luck by talking about it too much. I believe that words have power enough that you need to cancel out the bad ones (I have a ritual for doing that). I am also a little bit of a croucher these days, huddled into myself a bit, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But I am also grateful…so grateful. And I believe that struggling to do what you love, even if it isn’t what makes you money, is a noble cause. I believe in that passion, that conviction, right down to the core of my stupid romantic heart. The pragmatist in me, however, is fucking thrilled that the bills can actually be paid this month, a true justification of my love for what I do.

And that feeling of gratification that comes from doing what you love and getting paid well for it is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. To know that more than half of my income this month came from performing makes me feel like I’ve won some sort of personal victory. To know that I’m being paid 10 times more an hour to dance than I am to sit at my stupid desk job is like the big middle finger I’ve been itching to give to that 9-to-5 lifestyle that seems to do nothing but depress, bore, and repress me. That money frees me…

Performing is like any other freelance work: feast and famine. You have to be careful, to learn not to rely too much on any one client or source of income, because you are always acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of the work. You have to be light on your feet, willing to live a life of non-commitment, shifting schedules, and working late into the night while still getting up early in the morning. This has been difficult for me, as us Taurean kind are known for being creatures of habit, our routines providing us with a sense of security when everything around us is in flux. I’m a notorious worry-er when it comes to financial security, and though I have trained myself to focus on less than desirable amounts of sleep, I am at optimal happiness when I have curled up in my tiny bed with my kittens for at least 8 hours.

But I love the dynamism of this life. The changing schedule never gets boring, every new stage a chance to reach a new audience, expand my repertoire, challenge my skills. Last Wednesday I got a message on Myspace, asking if I could do a well-paying gig at a party promoting Level vodka the next night. I took it and made half my rent for 2 hours of work, thinking to myself, ‘nowhere but in New York City, doing what I do, would something like that happen.’ That just isn’t the average person’s experience.

And I like the power. I like the way it feels to fall into a cab at 2am, make-up still carefully painted on, clutching what is a week’s worth of pay for most people in $100 bills, cash money. I like the feeling of self-sufficiency, the feeling of pride that comes from knowing that I can take care of myself, that I don’t need to lean on anyone financially, that I can make my own rules and still take home a paycheck.

Being broken-hearted has always been good for my career. My heart broke, and I wrapped it carefully in a plaster cast, secured behind 6 panes of bulletproof glass, and there it stays, on the mend. My mind needs to be occupied, needs the distraction, and the obvious place to pour all of that angst-wracked, tragedy-borne energy is into my career. Because people are cruelly judgmental of those of us who put everything we have into loving someone, but people can always understand the desire to make your career the focus of all your attention.

Internally, though, astride all of the self-satisfaction and delight that comes from counting the cash, I begin to worry about myself when I shift into businesswoman mode. It means I have shuttered the windows on my love and battened down for the storm, tucking the tenderest parts of me into the storm cellar. And they will not reappear again for awhile…until the spring thaw has come to my heart for sure. And instead of falling in love over long walks in languid evening sunlight, I fall in love with strappy Calvin Klein shoes and Dolce & Gabbana handbags and trips to sunny places, equating spending that hard-earned cash with love…a love for myself, a love I earned with sweat equity, literally, dancing my way across lit stages and on top of bars in the late hours.

The problem is that I become distant, closed-off…a machine. The emotional tempest that I am is what I am. Feeling everything to my core, that reckless passion and the willingness to sacrifice everything for love is what has always set me apart from everyone else, for better for or worse. Without that, I am not me. Without that, I’m afraid of losing myself, my authenticity. Without that, I am just the lonely girl wearing the stunning shoes…

Losing It...

I hate being single...

I know I'm not supposed to say that. I know I am supposed to embrace it in a fiercely independent, big city girl, makin' it on my own kind of way. But I hate it. I've always been the kind of person who really likes the comfort and stability of relationships. I think we are derisively referred to as serial monogamists, like serial killers. Relationships give me the security to focus on the other things I want to do, acting as a solid foundation on which to land. Behind every good woman...

Being single makes me nostalgic, not only for the relationship most recently lost, but for all of the ones that came before. Remembering those less lonely times that I lean toward tropistically, like some sort of coupling sunflower.

The other day on the J train, I practically cuddled up to a Puerto Rican guy sitting to my right. His oversized graphic hoodie and serious ear bling reminded me of my most recent ex. I must have gotten the cuddle look in my eye, because I saw a micro-expression of fear flicker across his face. I'm not really sure how interested Puerto Rican men are in cuddling with emo dykes on the train, but I considered it.

But that sudden burst of lonely nostalgia opens a floodgate, and then I am standing knee-deep in memories, shaking my head at the strange moments my mind dredges up. Today it's candy, and I am thinking about the former sweet tooths to which I used to cater.

There was EV and her penchant for Turtles, a word that she also used to say to me in sign language...one of the few signs she could remember. I discovered the drag king's lactose intolerance, but I used to make her these epic, sugary coffee concoctions back in my barista days. With soymilk, of course. The musician preferred Zero bars, and I used to buy them as good-bye presents for the road when the time came to load up the tour Winnebago. The MFA loved Swedish Fish, which I'd never had until we started hanging out, discovering I was simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the way they stuck to my teeth. She also loved Chick-o-stix, which she used to buy by the handfuls on her late night sandwich runs to the murder mart on the corner. We’d snap them in half with our teeth, grinning at each other into our late hours of a Brooklyn nighttime…

These aren't the only things I remember. I can also tell you how they liked their coffee, the brand of cigarettes they smoked, the name of their first pet....The musician and I used to play the total recall game, and I would blow her out of the water with the details I could remember. This was not always a good game for us to play...

Days like these, I have to be careful...careful that I don't let my nostalgia run like a creek over these little pebbles of memory, buffing them into shiny, fabricated smoothness. Things are never just candy bars and coffee creamers....

But I had a revelation today as I entered my birthday month: I’m going to be 26 years old. I am young and intelligent and not missing any limbs. It is just on the verge of spring in this city and I don’t have a mortgage or babies sucking up all of my disposable income. And I am in New York fucking City, working my ass off. It’s high time I started playing my ass off.

I want to contemplate the next show I’m going to produce. I want to write freelance articles about the sex I am not having. I want to ponder my options for going back to school. I want 10-hour brunches and a pair of Calvin Klein Helios in black and cream but I do not want anything to do with being in love.

These days, I’m madly in love with my friends. This crazy train wreck I’ve been the past three months, they’ve had my elbow, steadying me the whole way. I show up to brunch dressed in stockings and heels for my future wife C, because I know she’ll appreciate it like nobody else does. Her kindness found itself popping the cork on many bottles of red wine while I lamented, her apartment a non-judgmental safe zone for another one of my motherfucking relationship sob stories. She and I are on the same wave, right down to our matching heels.

D has been my other half for 20 some odd years, and she’s been seeing me through heartbreak since I was 16 years old and my fundamentalist boyfriend told me he couldn’t love me because we weren’t “equally yoked.” She is a constant when everything else seems fucked.

I spend entire Sundays plastered to L and R’s couch, drinking and making loud, sarcastic comments about The L Word. They pretend to be entertained, even when I’m sure they are not, and they listen to my ridiculous predicaments, L offering carefully thought-out advice and R offering to let me know when I’m “acting a mess.” They are truly the captivating couple we all want to be a part of.

I will forever want to lean in close to talk to P. Swan over margaritas. Level-headed and never skimping on the hugs, I want to curl up on the couch for movies with her…I wish she were my brother. DC is my brand-new sounding board, a fierce femme relocated from the left coast whose take-no-prisoners attitude I find completely inspired.



And waiting for me down South, on the other end of the phone, is my good luck charm E, who is and always has been my refuge…a healthier form of escapism. Cuddling up beside her in bed is the only way for me to guarantee a peaceful night of sleep with good dreams. And there’s always B, singing me “Leather & Lace” to cheer me up in his slightly lazy drawl…

The point is, the love that I have for these friends is true, a talisman of faith, because where would I be without these people? As for being in love, well, you can't win back love that you lost and you can't fight for someone who doesn't want to be fought for. So what else can I do, get down on my knees and beg you to come back? Oh yeah, that’s right, I already tried that, and I am still hiding the scabs on my knees while they heal…

I have stuttered and scraped for being in love long enough. I'm ready to leave the prostrate pose and straighten up to standing. I can't always explain why people stop loving me or why they leave, but at some point, they're just gone. And the ache of that loss is never lessened by any explanation...

And yes, I am between a rock and a hard place. And like I said the other day, sometimes the best thing to do in that position is just stand still. So I’m gonna press my back against that rock and wedge my stiletto up against that hard place and pull out a bottle of wine, ‘cause I’m here for awhile.

If any of ya’ll need me, that’s where I’ll be…

Going Home Again...

I’ve been negligent with my posting, I know…

The last month sort of became overwhelmed with shit to do. This show was like our baby, mine and Jimmy’s, and it was all effort right up until the very end.

The aftermath of producing a show is sort of like what people must feel like after their wedding. A postpartum depression of sorts; you’ve given birth to this event and now it’s finished, but you’re so used to being pregnant…The actual event itself usually becomes something of a blur in your head, the particulars erased by the coursing adrenaline and the lack of food on your stomach.

I balance between being in the zone and being acutely attuned to what is happening around me. I generally don’t get very nervous these days, because I have physically trained myself out of it. I convince my body that I am not nervous so that it doesn’t betray me by shaking once I’m on stage…a perfectly composed statue of confidence. That’s Cherry Bomb all the way, a sparkly pillar of sexangerconfidence with a little swerve in her step.

The time spent back home was what it always is for me: a bittersweet reminder of who I was and where I am. The show itself was well-publicized and incredible, so many talented performers gracing a stage big enough to actually hold us all. People packed the place, pressing up close to the stage, cheering their faces off, and winging dollar bills at the performers as they navigated their pieces.

I had 3 ex-girlfriends in attendance, not to mention their assorted exes, 2 little sisters, and several of my closest friends, some from out of state. My first girlfriend ever showed up rather unexpectedly, meeting my sisters for the first time and allowing me to give them a little impromptu history lesson. “She’s cute!” whispered my youngest sister. There were awkward moments in bathroom hallways with exes and the exes of exes that made me feel like my Pussycat Dolls-esque spray on body shimmer should have actually been some kind of armor. And then there were the covert moments with exes of exes when I actually felt, for the first time, that the bubble had burst and everything might be okay for once.



The room was ripe with history, repeating and being made. And not just mine. At the end of the night, the owner sat back in his chair and said, “All my years in this business, and I think this is the first time I’ve ever paid out a woman in a tuxedo shirt and a chick in lingerie.” So, you see, there’s a first time for everything.

On Sunday I joined the rest of the performers for a quiet brunch. I sat in the sunlight as much as possible, quietly and physically feeling on the periphery of the interactions. I know these people, recognize their faces, their behaviors, their lives, but I’m not one of them. It was a familiar feeling of being the outsider, literally laying low and quiet. I know what they say about me when they think I won’t hear, and yet, I still feel a deep loss at never having been a part of what they have.

That’s how it goes for me: an internal struggle with the positive and the negative; taking the good with the bad. To be honest, part of me went back home to get vindication. I’ve had something to say to those people for a long time, and I finally had a chance to do it. This was my opportunity to make them see…to see how sorry they were for underestimating me, sorry for leaving me, sorry for not loving me more...sorry for not giving me a chance. But it was also about love…trying to earn that love and respect enough to make them stop saying, “stay away from that one, she’s dangerous…” A love that would ward off the jealous eyes and razor sharp judgments.

Even when it’s my party, I am still an outsider. I circle the perimeter, calmly these days, since in my older age I am discovering that this may be how it always is for me. That maybe I am still looking for a tribe to take me into their fold. A lone fragment seeking other shards.

And so it goes. A feeling of detachment, of calm interest as I watch what’s going on around me, interrupted only by a few short hours of authenticity in my best friend’s bed or some former old lady’s Mercedes…of real emotion breaking through my seamless façade and shaking me to the core. I force it back down, afraid to feel it, afraid to think it, committed to self-protection.



Back on the plane, I am suddenly anxious to get home. We circle Manhattan, the Chrysler building looking like the centerpiece of a snow globe, and I am gratefully eyeing the tiny toy subway trains making their way across the Manhattan Bridge. I stumble into my apartment, other urbanites flanking my sofa and chairs for a communally cramped Easter dinner, and I regale them with tales of the weekend. As we laugh about someone’s lip ring getting caught in my hair extensions, I look around and think,

…yeah, regardless of how I got here, this is where I need to be.