Ballad of the Hothouse Flower

"Mrs. Witterly is of a very excitable nature, very delicate, very fragile, a hothouse plant." -Nicholas Nickelby

Or, seasonal habits of the highly sensitive. I sometimes refer to myself as a hothouse flower. In unkinder terms: fussy, a whiner. There's a part of me that needs coddling, thrives under optimal conditions of heat and light, is sensitive in the extreme to its likes and dislikes, no matter how big or small. I need exact directions, a little handholding, an extra sweater, a handkerchief to sniffle into, the right kind of pants, information about the immediate future--when do we get to go home? will there be a place to seat? who is going to be there?

 Having no other option in the interest of my sanity, I've come to think of these predilections toward comfort as essentially positive traits, with positive outcomes. I fancy that there is a grace to my delicacy, the noble sheen of a wish for a better, more pleasant life in my constant need to monitor. If I'm paying attention in the right ways,  these tendencies create more ease and creativity in managing my day-to-day life. My attunement to sensory details and atmospheric data make me a valuable employee, a kickass hostess, and a pretty good friend.

And yet. A hothouse flower has connotations of weakness, a reliance on others to supply the caretaking, a fundamental inability to endure the endless barrages of unforgiving nature. And these hothouse parts of me, with their proclivity for sunlight, warmth, freedom of movement, absolute tenderness, endless encouragement, loathe and fear nothing quite so much as the coming of winter.

I have come to understand that I am a creature best suited to luxuriate in sunlight.  Cold weather descends and I fold like a house of cards. Gone the long summer walks, gone the sundresses and shorts and breezy tees of spring, gone the crisp novelty of fall.  Frost kills and I crumble, right around this time every year. My bravery is no longer aided by the magic of the holidays, the spiritual peaks and valleys of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the darkest nights of the year, the most poignant.

It's the second week of January and my predominant thought now is that winter sucks. I"m dehydrated, sore, tired, snotty. I don't know what to do with my hair. Getting dressed has become nothing short of a heartbreaking, tedious chore.  Too many layers involved, too much scratchiness, stuffiness, not-quite-rightness. Static electricity lurks everywhere with its pointless, non-warming energy. I could write a separate essay on the torture device known as a winter coat. My resolutions are tried and tempted, it's cold as fuck but with no snow to speak of, everyone's relationship is falling apart under the sudden cease of holiday pressure and before the insidious crawl of February toward Valentines' day. My skin is somehow dry and breaking out at the same time, there's stubble poking through my tights, my sweatpants need to be washed every two days because I sweat through them in the middle of the sleepless night. Finding matching socks is a trek across the icy landscape of living room and kitchen. In short,  everything feels like a trial. Everyone is pissing me off, including myself. The news is even more horrible than usual. I'm restless and closed in, craving space, but doing much of anything feels like too much.

 I almost cried today because I couldn't make my braids look like they do on Game of Thrones. My health insurance bill was four times what it was in December and I don't know why and I need to call people and email things to fix it and I wailed for an hour and a half after realizing this. I'm an idiot child struggling through this life sometimes, doing way less than my best on most days and some days just surviving. And maybe doing that requires some strength that is integral to the hothouse flower. Some hardiness that is fueled, not thwarted, by this need for creature comforts. I take comfort in this sense of unconventional strength.

 A hothouse flower of a different color mused to me last night, in light of Hebdo, in light of every dark and brutal and chaotic thing, in light of this narrowing of the year to a pinpoint--on the essential meaninglessness of life. I was only partly joking when I offered hedonism as a possible answer to this riddle, that our only purpose, really, and the only meaning, is to seek what brings us pleasure. There is a part of me that absolutely believes that this way lies salvation. Filling your life with what is most beautiful and stimulating to you is a crucial function of a healthier life more free of needless suffering. The animal warmth of my body, my socked feet lying on his moving chest, the hum of a house in winter, time softly ticking from eleven to midnight. And I'll take that over meaninglessness any day, but hedonism has its limits.

The challenge, for any hothouse flower, is to learn how to water and sun and feed yourself--for me that means finding ways to have lots of leafy greens, exercise, orgasms, dancing, and pleasure even in the dead of winter. It means striving for those things that give me the best chance, whatever they are, from vitamin d supplements to a space heater. I sat in the sauna at the Y today, finally experiencing the miracle of sweat, breathing in and out, drinking water out of jar I'd found half-frozen in my borrowed car. For just these things I felt deeply grateful, and of course once I started I thought of many more. My blessings are incalculable. In the locker room two women started talking about their hair together, swapping ways to wear it while undergoing cancer treatments and beyond them. It was a brief, warm interaction. One woman recounted her first shortest ever cut, visiting Germany in 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down, how she walked out in the street after her friend cut her hair, how she felt the air on her scalp, how she caught sight of herself in a store window and was transfixed, not recognizing herself.

Suddenly my braids seemed less important, this clutch that winter has on my hot little heart less strangling. It is ok not to know what to do with your hair, your room, your clothes, your life. It's ok not to know what to study or who to date or how to live. It's ok just to sit, and pay attention to what your stupid little magical body needs and just try to answer that need. Sometimes that's really the only thing you can do. Put on another goddamn coat already and get ready to grow.

Resolution Versus Reality

I made a grandiose new year's resolution to write in this space every day for the month of January. When I set this intention it didn't feel out of the realm of possibility. Depending on the length and subject matter,  these posts take only a couple hours of my time.  There's few days that go by that I don't waste as least as much time as it takes to scribble down some thoughts and keep practicing my writing. I got home from working a ten hour shift at the restaurant on Saturday and stayed up late writing so I wouldn't miss a day. Yesterday, I wrote but didn't publish...I wasn't finished yet.  Another part of my resolution was to not write about writing--consider that one scratched too.

It is far too easy for me to run out of time, to have a range of excuses not to write. These excuses are as frustratingly legitimate as they are not. I'm sleep deprived. The rib injury I wrote about a few weeks ago is back in force. I've been working non-stop for the holidays and my muscles are sore and my spirit is drained. My room is a mess. I have a date tonight I don't want to cancel, I have to babysit in an hour and I'm writing this in the lobby of the Y where I am trying to sneak in a quick sauna session so I can take a few deep breaths and have ten minutes to myself. In short, life pulls constantly. In short, I want a lot more than ten minutes to myself.

I tried to enter this resolution with a spirit of openness, to see it as an exercise, not a bound-in-iron mandate. But my psyche apparently loathes a half-measure and has a seriously wack perspective on what I am truly capable of and under which conditions. I should know after twenty-seven years that I have never been able to change or implement a habit by sheer force of will and there is almost no activity I can successfully replicate day after day after day. Science tells us that almost no one can, but this is not satisfying to the part of me that has this belief that if I just fucking tried harder I could force myself to write every day for the rest of my life, forget about the thirty days--that if I cared enough, focused enough, sacrificed enough I would be able to live up to some heretofore untapped work ethic and creative potential. I know in theory that entering into a project with such a spirit should preclude the harshness with which I've been re-reading my efforts so far (and frankly, cringing) but I don't know what else to do but keep trying.

And there is the voice in my head that says that none of this fucking matters--hissing sweetly about all the times in my life that I have set myself a goal and failed (please see: every last one) and all the ways in which ultimately, the only person who cares about this is me. When this voice acknowledges that other people exist at all, its to remind me that they probably are also thinking that I'm a scattered, lazy sack-of-shit who's never accomplished much of anything.

I know it's ridiculous to expect perfect, tidy prose to appear under these conditions. Of course I might need more than a few hours. Of course I might need to sacrifice some dates, breathe through the pain, sleep a little smarter, not put as much pressure on each post. And of course none of this is helped by lambasting myself, as I have been doing roundly all morning, for not just being a better person. But without this resolution, I won't write as much. I know that as surely as I know that without a job to go to most days of the week, I get depressed and slothful. But as so often happens when I put external controls on my behavior, another part of my spirit rebels. A healthy challenge quickly becomes an albatross. The call is coming from inside the house.

The Tao of Barney Stinson's Chopsticks

It may not surprise you at this point to learn that there is almost nothing--from mints to hairdryers--to which I will not apply intense analysis. This trait serves me well in some situations and less well in others. In school it was a boon, my ace in the hole. (When in doubt, perform close reading). In relationships, it means I can often have a seemingly uncanny grip on a particular dynamic. This analysis is in no way divorced from my intuition. They operate as a stream. My default state, perhaps because I am a twin--is deeply symbiotic, a fluid balance between focus and spirit.

The downside is an inability to separate myself from this function and partake in the less elegant world of reality. It took me until I was at least 24 years old to fully realize that not every person I encountered could read my mind, and vice versa. Further, there is an inability to stop the flow of analysis, no matter how ultimately trivial the object of attention. Symbiosis has its heartbreaking limits. There comes a time in every witch's life where she must learn to divine analysis from intuition and choose how to wield them together and alone for the best outcomes. This education comes slowly.

By way of example, there is my engagement with the television show How I Met Your Mother. At this point I've been watching for years. My interest has swung from casual to minor obsession to background noise to nostalgia and back again. It is with an appropriately ashamed pride that I admit I could probably fill a volume with essays about this show and my relationship with it.  But to illustrate the psychological phenomenon I'm attempting to define, consider this one item: I have determined that a consistent detail through all nine seasons of this sitcom is that the actor Neal Patrick Harris, portraying Barney Stinson, is unable to properly deploy chopsticks in the never-ending parade of takeout meals featured in at least every other episode of this bougie-ass show.  The one possible exception is in season seven, episode three, entitled  Ducky Tie" in which in order to see his married female friend's breasts, Barney flawlessly practices Hibachi cooking which he has learmed in secret.

Low-brow plot points aside, I find this one detail deeply compelling. Partly, it is that I recognize myself in his humbling and endearing ineptitude. I  too am familiar with the near-miss, the blind spot, the social grace just out of reach, the frustration of faking an unattainable skill. At times, when I've caught sight of a botched rise and fall of rice-to-mouth, I've felt sorry for Barney, going hungry through all those imaginary meals. Through multiple viewings, I've watched for instances of this quirk with patient, critical hope, pondering every emotional resonance and possible meaning of such a regular irregularity. I've considered whether the repetition was conscious on the part of the actor (and wouldn't that be satisfying) or merely circumstantial, perhaps even a fever dream of my own creation produced from too many nights falling asleep to urbane patter and a soothing laugh track. Maybe Neal was just on a diet all those years. I haven't gone so far as to scour any forums about it, but clearly it's only a matter of time.

And to what end, this conjecture, this culling of meaning, this arbitrary focus? I can't imagine a scenario more utterly pointless on nearly every level and yet I find myself fascinated by its existence--drawn in again and again every time the moment is captured, that small, winking flaw. To what end is my telling of this strange anecdote? Only that it moves me, only that it captures some essence of this piece of art I've spent so much wasteful and worthy time with, only that it expresses some microcosm of myself: the trying and failing, the noticing and not, the trivial and the true.

Mint Condition

I've been mildly addicted to lifesaver mints, wintergreen flavor, for just over a decade.  You know, the ones that populate candy dishes at reception desks. I hate how much I love these motherfucking cavity bombs. The mint flavor is concentrated and sugary--a delicious, spiky intensity. I crush them between my teeth, slide my tongue over and around them, let little shards break off and crunch them delicately, suck on them until there's nothing left. There is something deeply soothing about their solid round heft, the transition from whole, chunky perfection, the little ridges of those letters stamped into every fucking one hard against the roof of my mouth, my rough tongue smoothing the edges, into a dissolved mass of crumbly, electrically charged mint.

I'm not sure when my love affair began with these killers of oral hygenie, but by god has the obsession lasted longer than it should. I remember buying bags of these with my twin sister and mixing them in with the other candies we bought for long car trips, the whole bag getting infected with their minty intoxication. My mother used to find the wrappers all over the house, our slightly forbidden habit a source of housekeeping and parental consternation. We were indeed ruining our teeth with them. But to this day when I break down and buy a bag--usually when I'm feeling depleted, out-of-control, at loose ends--I feel a frisson of rebelliousness. Health be damned, these things are goddamn delicious. It makes me feel connected to my twin when we are far away, though she's far more successfully broken the habit---a little spark of nostalgia and love blooming with every insidious crunch.

 I'll go days or weeks or months without giving in, then spend a weekend in an orgy of mint-crushing, a graveyard of rustling wrappers collecting in my jacket pockets and the corners of my room, soothing my oral fixations with a distressingly manic intensity. I've eaten them until the taste turns ashy and dead and then back again into savor.

Obviously there are some conflicting emotions at play here. How frustrating, that breaking oneself of bad habits is so piecemeal--I wish I could sever the neural pathways for all my vices at once, be done with the whole parcel of them, freed from conflicting desires. I wish there was labor involved, less sifting of which habit is of the highest priority to change, less need to understand the myriad impulses behind the push-pull I feel every time I catch a whiff of wintergreen and my mouth begins to water, each time I drift to the candy aisle seemingly unconsciously.

 But my drive for self-improvement is packaged with my drive for self-destruction, and the space between is what I must inhabit to leave compulsive behaviors behind. I have a stubborn and sometimes perverse pride in  allowing myself the indulgent purchase of these confections, despite the obvious detriments to my health, in the name of pleasure, in the name of the freedom of choice. Combined with the physical triggers I've developed, this is a feeling that is hard to replace with the less immediately satisfying thrill of restraint and discipline.  My choice to persist arrives not only out of an instinct for hedonism, but is also tied to feelings of shame about still having such a childish vice. It is easier by far to spend two dollars and several hours happily, if guiltily, munching away, than to deal with this fragile sliver of ego so enmeshed in this cycle of self-determination and self-loathing.

There's a part of me that is loathe to give up such a quick fix, and part that is weary from a few years spent breaking myself of far nastier habits. For some of us, self-harm is a matter of degree. It's hard to admit that while chewing lustily on mints, as my teeth suffer the consequences, is just as much an action of self-loathing as cutting myself. The two behaviors vary in degree, but not content--I buy packs of mints under similar conditions to when I used to punish my body in more dramatic ways-- when forceful emotions gorge my throat, when I feel powerless to fix the larger problems in my life, when I'm fucking sad and lost and confused. And hit of sugar and mint, to be blunt, is far less satisfying than the opiate rush of cutting myself, less effective at deadening the immediate pain. Of course it's also less obviously destructive.

And so, here we are, in a new year. I know that I have to turn the same practices of gentleness and self-love that I used to break myself of the self-harm habit toward this lesser evil. There was no way I could bully myself out of that behavior, no amount of negative self-talk "This is weak, this is foolish, this is selfish" that could stay my hand, no amount of grief that I witnessed in the eyes of the friends, lovers, and family, who winced and wept and cajoled and freaked seeing my cuts, no power on earth that could stop me. There was only me, and at the time, I could not recognize myself as being enough, felt the isolation of this truth only rather than the purity of its power.

In the case of my self-harm, I had to learn the reasons behind what I was doing with a competent and professionally detached therapist. I had to learn the peaks and valleys of the brain chemicals involved in the addiction. I had to learn to notice the patterns of self-talk that led to a relapse, painstakingly accounting for each moment that occurred before ultimate action. Then, I had to learn to let the impulse come up and pass without taking action, and further, without judging its existence. I had to learn how to wait it out, how to sit with myself and let the feelings come without attacking or running, let the agonizing moments pass until finally, the next moment came, until normal time caught up with me again and I realized I had successfully done nothing. I had to deal with the sick, sad part of myself that took such inaction as evidence of further weakness, further shame. I had to embrace the part of myself that took immense comfort and even a sort of pleasure in the stinging, bleeding evidence that I was still alive despite my pain, that I had this strange power to mar and harm and continue on, to seize some control of chaos. I draw a connection between this darkness and the sheer animal pleasure I take in rolling that mouth-watering mint flavor between my teeth and crushing it to nothingness.

My brain is a much nicer place to live these days. The habits of attention I have cultivated come to my aid. When I feel the increasingly rare impulse to cut, I am able to notice it almost immediately, cut the urge off at its source with compassion. Those thoughts come up and I nod at them with a familiar, almost casual love. I do not hesitate to stop what i am doing and send kind energy to those parts that wish to wreak havoc. I recognize that these impulses come from a part of me that has done its poisonous best for years to help and protect a small, neglected, vulnerable part of me from feeling pain in the only way I allowed it to, not realizing the consequences, ignorant of the toll this takes on my other struggling parts. That protective part of me knows now that there are other, better ways to do its job.

And so here we are in the new year. The time is right for me to challenge myself to love the demonic child within who cannot get enough sugar, enough attention, enough love, enough raw sensual experience. I must turn the same patience and benevolent regard to mediating this lesser evil of a habit. I have to do better by not trying to be better. I have to accept the brightness of demanding more of myself, of letting the cream of my self-love rise until it's not as scary to take charge of my life, schedule the damn, expensive dental appointment, to have enough respect for myself to treat myself well from toenails to tooth enamel.

I have to meet myself where I am, one two-dollar bag at a time, one miserable. rainy, tired night at a time, one moment by one moment until the next moment finally arrives. And I will realize I have done nothing, and left a candy aisle empty-handed. Gratitude will be there, and simultaneously despair will rush in. I will want to go back inside, quell the inner storm with swift, chaotic action. I will notice this despair and love myself for it, and I will let out a shaky breath, or a soft laugh. I will pause and hold that darkness up to the light.  I'll stand in the parking lot, and there I'll be, still myself, with more habits to begin and break, as many as there are parts of myself to love, running my tongue over the slickness of my perfect, damaged teeth, running my fingers over my perfect, faded scars.

Hair, Dry, Love

I'm in a serious relationship with my hairdryer. I received it as a gift from my brother-in-law Curt when I was studying abroad in Ireland in 2008 and it's still chugging along. It's moved with me from dorm to dorm, house to house, across state lines and back.

It's a simple model, utilitarian, classic. Grey and black. The handle folds neatly into itself and the cord retracts. It fits my hand.

I had long, long hair then. I'd asked for it specifically as part of a secret santa type deal I had going with my siblings and their significant others that Christmas. The gift pegged Curt as the giver right away: it was exactly what I wanted and arrived within days of the request. He sent me a lot of sweet little presents that December: that poster of Obama changed to say STRONG EXAMS, Elvis's Blue Christmas sent directly to my inbox. But I loved the hairdryer most of all. The housing for international students was a converted seminary and it was cold. I had a sink in my room and a mirror, but the showers were down a long, drafty hall with a bone-chilling wood floor. The showers themselves were housed in a beautiful but unheated tiled room. The water never quite got hot and I would race back to my room sopping wet, towel off my hair, the strands already freezing together, and stand in front of my mirror, dryer in hand, until I was warm.

I didn't quite know how to wear my long hair yet. I didn't know how to handle any of it in fact, it being sudden sexual attention after two years at Bryn Mawr, sudden appraisals, flirtations, seductions, rituals I couldn't understand. I was negged constantly, probably because men could sense my discomfort, my willingness to be fixed. I was teased about my glasses, my vocabulary, my fashion choices--everything was fair game and I had no tools to deflect, absorbed every scrap greedily regardless, even when what I felt was more bewildered and hurt than adored and hungered for. I believed everything anyone said about me.

 I got attention for my hair and I would puzzle over it, experimenting with different speeds and strengths of the dryer, different head movements and levels of toweling required. I had no idea what the fuck was happening. I would flip my hair back and forth, running my fingers through the strands, trying to make sense of the adult emerging in front of my eyes, this woman with long hair, with effect.

 My new friends and I took advantage of our study abroad experience to drink as much as humanly possible, and definitely more than was probably good for my fragile 21 year-old brain. I threw up in bar bathrooms all over Dublin. I broke wine glasses, ran down city streets, woke up with strange bruises and generally made an ass out of myself in ways that only a recently de-virginized Catholic girl with a taste for freedom and an equally strong taste for love can. I danced all night and slept on floors and lost cellphones and followed strangers around. I ditched a taxi. I kissed anyone who'd ask and some who didn't. I held my friend's hair back for her and peed simultaneously while she puked eight euros of white wine into an alley behind a McDonald's, and then helped her befriend a stray cat stumbling back to my dorm. I fell in love with the best friend I made there and hid his lube and condoms from his visiting mother when he was in the hospital.

 I slept with an unbelievably hot Swedish man and he got me good, made sex real to me in a way it hadn't been. He broke my glasses one drunken night and refused to give head and I confused watching Die Hard on his lap and then fucking for some kind of commitment. Once he and his friend intimated spanking me for breaking something in the kitchen late one night and it was so casual and erotic that I flushed more completely than I ever have since. I helped fruit vendors unpack at dawn in Berlin with my best friend from home and my twin sister. I went home with the tour guides from the Guinness factory after being called out on microphone for tripping spectacularly in the lobby. I stole their wooden parrot and received a text the next day that read "You probably shouldn't have given us the benefit of the doubt." I went to karaoke every Thursday night at the Wicked Wolf and drank cider through straws.

The depth of my innocence, my lack of preparedness, was completely unknown to me. I spent a lot of time in that cold little room, eating toast and delicious irish butter arduously prepared in a shared kitchen three flights of stairs down, streaming episode of episode after any cheesy American sit-com I could find until the room lightened, sleeping through my classes until the afternoon. I wept while gchatting and watched every Britney Spears video I could find. I stayed up all night writing papers I had done all the reading for within the first two weeks of the semester, fantasized endlessly and shamelessly about every male Irish professor I had.

So the perfect gift came at the perfect time. It was silly, I knew, but it touched me deeply when I opened it, and every time I thought of Curt selecting it on some website, entering in my address. Thinking of me, maybe, and this simple act of providing something for me I couldn't provide for myself. I'd sung Chapel of Love with him and my sister on the final drive to their wedding, Caitlin's dress filling the car with its whiteness, the green and gold of June in Connecticut flying past, saturating the blue sky glinting in the mirrors and windows, our mood nearly hysterical. We'd run a half-marathon together, drunk cocktails in their first apartment in South Boston. He'd covered for me when I'd gotten wasted at an early summer party my first year home from college, taking the blame for the noise my friends made dragging me up the stairs to my bedroom.

Thinking of his love and friendship comforted me every time I dried my hair. There were a lot of hard times to come, and a lot of times Curt would give me more than an appliance to ease them. But the hairdryer says it all for me. Even now I can get a sparkle thinking about it as I warm up with a quick blow on greasy hair or take my time going full witch blown out--it being generosity,  it being love, it being having someone on your side even when they are very far away.

My hairdryer now is more about meditation and security than it is a tool of discovery. It's a great way to calm myself down before going somewhere, the whoosh of hot air around my head in counterpoint to some deep breaths, some forward folds and neck rolls to get the blood flowing. I look at myself in the mirror and luxuriate in the feeling of my hair falling over my shoulders, the smooth flow of it through my hands, my fingers on my scalp. The gradual change from damp to dry, the moments in between. I put it down for a minute and change the song, put on underwear, make my bed, then pick it up again, start fresh.

I joke about it, but there's a part of me that truly believes I derive strength from my hair. When I have really good sex or a really good meal or a really good workout I picture it all going straight to my hair. Spiritual and practical: When I'm using my dryer, I assess the health of my hair and think about what I've been doing lately, how that might be transfiguring what's literally coming out of my head. Curt is a filmmaker, among much else, and in his first documentary there's a scene that's always stuck with me, a scientist testing Curt's hair to assess his intake of corn products. I still find it amazing how much he could deduct just from a strang of hair. My hair is a barometer of my overall status, my overall alignment with elementary principles of input and output.

We're told that we mustn't become too attached to objects, but to me that carries the same flaw in logic as saying that money can't buy happiness. What I really needed, as that bitter December passed, was a way to dry my goddamn wet cold mass of hair, and I was too broke to buy a fucking 12 euro hairdryer. It was just exactly what I needed. And, as so often happens when we ask for what we really need, I got a hell of a lot more than that.

The Right Way To Do It

Ten tips for a good sex life that also apply to horrible, terrible, magic, stupid new year's eve.

1. It's not just about kissing.

2. Exfoliate.

3. You won't get what you want unless you ask for it.

4. Sometimes you won't get it.

5. Lower your goddamn expectations.

6. Breathe, bitch.

7.  It doesn't matter how anyone else likes to do it.

8. It matters quite a bit how you like to do it.

9. Remember any of us could die at any moment.

10. Stay hydrated.

Happy Fucking

New Year

On Mixed Blessings

It's two days before Thanksgiving, and I'm putting cinnamon oil on my feet. I'm trying to drive down the sporadic fever this cold brought along. What a small miracle it is that I can do this, that I have a body that responds to this, that I have a body that can fight a cold. What a small miracle it is that I live in the kind of house where there's oils and someone who can tell you what to do with them.

Earlier in the week I was cursing this cold with all my might. Everyone at work had it before me, the same cough, same weakness, same fever and chills. I cursed the crazed mindset of the American worker who cannot bear to miss a day of work even when contagious and the corrupt financial system that effectively prohibits one from doing so. I'm driving a rental car up the snow-threatened Northeast corridor tomorrow from North Carolina. Roommate and her dog in tow. I am desperately worried about money and worried about the jobs I'm not finding and the pieces I'm not writing because my body is sick. I spend so much of my time wrestling with how to spend it that when I have to face a physical reality, when I am forced to rest, there comes a twisted relief that I then feel guilty about feeling. Call it faking-a-sick-day syndrome.

But here I am, rubbing cinnamon oil onto the soles of my feet, feeling it draw the heat down from my temples. I'm drinking the fanciest orange juice I could find at the discount grocery store and filling the tub, rubbing cedarwood and eucalyptus onto my chest, watching streaming Gilmore Girls on my parents' Netflix account.  The dryer is churning in the back room. The dog pads in wearing her green sweater and gives me her soft, sweet, single-tongue-swipe kiss. I activate my credit card so I can rent this car and the sweetest woman named Beth wishes me a Happy Thanksgiving.  I have friends coming over later to celebrate our departure, still others that have reached out to check on me while I've been sick.

There are too many disgusting and horrible things happening in our country this week to handle. My head is awash in homeopathic cough medicine and hours of smart, snappy dialogue and endless images of cities torn apart, families suffering, so much hate and fear that I find myself astounded--wounded, even--to realize that there is no moral consensus when it comes to atrocity. How I hate knowing this, how dumbfounded and powerless I feel in its raw, basic truth.

What relief I might feel if it were true that everyone reacted to murder in the same way, if everyone reacted to rape the same way. Just on a human level--some kind of a stable response to injustice, to trespass. But it's not that way. We all empathize to different extents, we all have blind spots, we all react out of fear in some circumstances and with love in others. And a lot of those characteristics come from our backgrounds, the experiences we have had or not had, the education we've been granted. I know this intellectually but in practice it is dark, it is enraging, it is threatening, and it is fucking sad. It's sad to me that I can look in the face of someone I know--even love--and see that we will not agree on Ferguson, will not agree about Bill Cosby, will be incapable of arriving at the same conclusions.

I'm shaving my legs, visions of snow-proof outfits dancing in my head. I'm drinking tea with elderberry and hibiscus. I'm rubbing vegetable glycerin into my face, into my new tattoo to make it soft. The beauty of my rib cage with its new black words in the mirror takes my breath. And even so my own existence is making me angry. My own complicity in these disgusting and horrible things taking place, my own inability to do anything to assuage the grief my heritage has directly produced.

A day or two ago I explained to the politically-minded man I'm sleeping with that just because my rapist will never be convicted of a crime doesn't mean a crime didn't occur. I found I have to ungrit my teeth to do it, I have to relax, I have to trust that I will be heard. Saying it out loud melts something in me, tempers somehow the unfathomably deep well of anger. But it still hurt. It still cost me something.  But the melting happened and the gap that had been between us for a moment suddenly wasn't and I also have to take that as a small miracle.

My body is racked with this cough. These sparse connections and disconnections are racking my mind. I want to take the whole world by the shoulders, shake it into waking up. The sheer frustration I feel is hot grit, a glaring, malignant error, a pebble in your shoe that is actually crippling you. My legs are smooth under the hot water. Luke is forgiving Lorelai for saving his dead father's boat. I received a book of poetry recently. On the last page it says "Explaining will get us nowhere." On the last page it says "We are all just trying to be holy."*

*Richard Siken, Crush