but the streets have exploded.  inside, we are making phone calls and sending texts and anticipating the speech and marveling at the sounds that are pouring in the open windows.  bh is sitting on the bed, in the dark, calling people she loves and watching second avenue, moved.  we are all at the very edge of tears.

a small parade files down ninth street.  people in a row, banging pots together.

we had been talking about waiting.  about seeing the speech and then going outside.  but it is infectious, this spirit.  i turn around and everyone’s coats are on.  everyone is ready to go.

we burst into the street a little bit drunk on the wine but mostly drunk on the excitement.  new york city is exploding like we are.  we round the corner and i jump, like a five year old, up and down up and down.  a girl with a blonde pixie cut comes barelling toward bh and i and we are hugging.  bh and this stranger and i.  and it does not feel strange.  it feels…good.  like relief.  like we can all finally breathe again.  after a long day.  after eight years.

i call my father and scream into the phone ‘we won!’ and he does not respond.  i wonder if he has hung up on me, or me on him.  but he is there.  perhaps mostly asleep when he answered and shocked by the explosion of sound in his ear.  some small part of me wants to call my brother and gloat.  the traitorous mccain supporter that he is.  but most of me isn’t even interested.  it’s no longer worth the fight, because it is over.  i’m too happy to want to spoil it with someone else’s misery.

as mccain is conceeding we pile into the bar and buy more drinks and there is only joy.  the streets are still exploding.  we can hear it.  we wait for the speech.

and that is when the real crying starts.  earlier, the tears only sparkled in my eyes, only burned at them.  only threatened.  perhaps one or two fell.

but then he speaks.  and the moment is epic.  and the words are beautiful.  the kinds of things i’ve longed to hear for so many years.  for as long as i’ve been old enough, informed enough to care.  and i am crying.  relief and joy and hope.

not much later we are leaving.  it is late, but not as late as i feared i’d be awake.  i feared ‘oh four all over again.  i feared going to bed and still not knowing.

we snap silly pictures outside the bar, bh, lm and i.  in which we are all out of focus and tipsy.  but we are too happy to care.  too happy to correct, to delete and retake.  because there is something about that picture.  how it its dizzy with joy.  and we know we want the memory captured just how it is.  just how it happened.  in case we ever forget the hugging in the street and the hollering and the pots and pans banging down ninth street in a row.

when i get home i watch replays of the end of the speech.  and i cry more.  i sob.

and then i crawl into bed, not even bothering with pajamas.  just stepping out of my clothes and crawling in.

and that is how you know it was a good night.  when you sleep in your underwear and wake up dehydrated–from booze, from joyful tears–but somehow insanely content with the state of the world around you.  and with your place in it.

but today i am taking the time.  i am loading washers and slumping down in a plastic chair on the sidewalk, schlubby in my laundry day clothes, reading and watching people in turns.  this is one of the things i like about doing my own laundry.  it forces me to take some time.  sometimes i go for runs while things dry.  always, though, i have a book.  i read while clothes wash, and on particularly lazy days–like today–i read while the clothes dry.

as i am starting part one of the maytrees a couple strolls up, stopping only a few feet form me to walk slow circles, lean against a car.  the woman is a woman.  stylish but plain.  the man is what stands out.  not remarkably handsome or striking.  it is just the way he is put together that catches my eye.  makes me want to laugh aloud.  he is foreign, with some kind of romantic accent i cannot immediately place.  and he is a hiptard, as we have taken to calling them.  and better yet, he is smoking a cigar.  as if this is something young men do all the time, on average saturday afternoon strolls.  it is part of his image, i know, part of the whole carefully cultivated thing his outward existence has become.

on friday night i am in williamsburg with the girls.  bh, lm, bt, mk, and i.  the place is overflowing with hiptards.  like it’s their job to circulate there.  climbing out at the bedford l stop i notice it immediately–my tights are not ripped enough, the soles of my shoes are still intact, my hair is styled to look like it is styled.  walking down the streets i consider for a moment that they are all thinking “send that thing back to the upper east side” when they see me.  i mean, my jeans are skinny, but i think that’s where any hipsterishness ends.  my blazer is piped in a contrasting color and my purple satin shoes are new and my cocktail ring is huge and sparkly.  it is all clean and new.

we have tapas and drinks at mk’s restaurant and then begin the roaming trip around williamsburg from bar to bar.  i want to club a girl to death with my epic cocktail ring in the first bar, she is so loud it makes my brain hurt and stops my ability to think or communicate with my friends.  she takes over the bar with her sound.  but we stay, at least for a while.  long enough for dw–the first messy male guest of the night–to fall asleep on the banquette next to us.

the second bar is beautiful and so are the cocktails the smartly dressed barkeeps agressively shake together and pour into glasses with perfect, perfectly huge icecubes.  we stay long enough for only one drink, watch the only cute guys in the place fail at hitting on girls we have assumed are lesbians then sadly leave, and have one final guest appearance just after a 2.30 am last call.

it is at this point that i begin asking where we are.  if we have left the city of new york simply by coming here.  i thought it was just a different borough, not another city, state, country.  where i come from, only across the river in new york county, last call is four am.  not 2.30ish.

p makes his guest appearance brightly.  if he is drunk, it is not of the caliber that dw was drunk.  he is still happy and silly and aggressively himself.  with him we leave the second bar to head to a third, one that is still serving.  he and bh giggle like school girls and i rub his bare, hairy belly at his request although i do not know why i am doing it.

in the third bar the idea that i may be in another place entirely is reinforced.  a boy in a plaid shirt buys me a drink (i do not even know how i have managed this, for i have not so much as looked at him since i entered).  he asks where i am from, as though it is clear to him as well that this is not my place.  that i am not of williamsburg in any way.  that i am a tourist in what i thought was my own city.

i am not interested in him.  but tonight i am being uncharacteristically kind.  it is not like me to speak to someone that i’m sure i’m not into.  it is more like me to turn my back and hope they go away.  even the ones who have bought me a drink.  this is perhaps why i am single.  or why people think i’m a bitch.  i am okay with that.  no need to encourage men, to give false hope.  i think that’s worse.

but i am talking to him.  and his legitimately foreign friend, who for now i will say is argentinian.  he looks like orlando bloom in priates of the caribbean–unruly pseudo-curls of greasy hair falling around his face.  for some reason i am kind of attracted to him, although i do not want to be.  but i don’t think he’s getting it.  he is pushing me toward his friend.  i realize then that i am marked territory.  like a firehydrant that has been urinated on by another dog.  i give him up.  attempt to return to my friends.

“cheers manhattan girls!” the one who bought me the drink later says, bursting into the middle of our huddled conversation.  he clinks his can of pbr–oh, hipsters–against our glasses, the rioja and the vodka and the vodka and the beer.

we laugh to ourselves, wondering where it has come from.  like manhattan is a place so far away.  like you cannot see it, jsut to your right, when you’re standing outside the bar.

later when we burst out into the streets to leave, a little drunk and a lot happy, i am detained by the guys.  they implore me to come back.  repeatedly asking to see me again but only by asking me to return to this very bar.  i wonder at the fact that they have not asked for my number, it would be more certain than just asking me back. i would have said no.  but then, at least, they would have had their answer.

and then i remember their area code.  how it is different from mine.  and i realize why they didn’t ask.

it would have been of no use.  even if i had said yes.  because i was a tourist in their world.  glamorous and interesting only because i was there for a moment.  because i would be gone.

he wants to ask if i am all right.  he is waiting, i think, for tears.  for an explosion. he looks at me like i am a ticking time bomb, brought to life.

he is petrified.  like he might need to deal with it.  honestly, i just have a headcold.

*

i have not helped myself, of course.

i have probably made it worse, actually.  but then.  that’s what your twenties are for, right?  making messes that you can clean up for the rest of your life.  or in this case, for the next week or so.

its probably three am.  i haven’t looked at a watch or my phone or a clock on a wall in, well, hours.  but i know that it is very late.  and we, bh and i, have entered the belly of the beast.  also known as le souk on a friday night.  this place, from the front (after 8 gin&tonics), looks so unassuming.  and then you cross the threshold.  and then you are in the playboy grotto.  and it goes on forever.  it is bananas.  in not a good way.

we walk circles.  two of them.  they are demented, up and down stairs in and out of room after room, zigzagging everywhere, and not just because of the crowd.  the entire time i am confused.  what does this have to do with hookah.  i am here because i was invited, yes, but primarily because i really want to smoke a hookah.  what is with the jammed dance floor?  the loud music you can’t speak or think over?

i should have known better.  but then.  that’s the theme of my entire night.

*

we’re in dba.  the crowd is shockingly, pleasingly mixed.  i’m encouraging–or perhaps over encouraging–bh to hit on the boy with the beard.  we’re calling him her boyfriend.  he is very much her type.  she is claiming not to remember how, like this is a foreign skill.  i admit, it has been some time for her.  her last relationship, not very long over, was long term.  it has been a few years.

but here’s the thing.  bh has skills.  like nobody’s business this girl has skills.  she’s practically taught me everything i think i know about being sultry and flirtatious and smolderingly feminine.  she owns this part of the game.  and its like riding a bike.  she remembers it.  her body remembers it.  she just has to get back on.

and then there he is.  the cutest guy i’ve seen in what feels like hours, across the bar.  he seems at first to be foreign, something about the way his shirt falls open just so.  i want him on sight.  i want him to want me.  and so i use my one and only girl trick–which, as mentioned earlier, comes directly from bh’s playbook–my eyes.  i run it all.  the eye contact, effectively timed glances away, batting lashes, small smiles, i bite my lip and play with my straw.  and inside two minutes he is heading my way.  a rush of adrenaline.

and then, he speaks.  and he goes immediately from cute to dumb.  which might be fine, if he’ll just shut up and buy me a drink.  which he seems to catch on to.  you don’t have to be smart to kiss me.  you just have to play your cards right.  but it ends when he leans over to the bar.  i have been speaking to him for two minutes tops at this point.  and his hands are on me.  no.  they are not just on me.  they are all over me.  they are up my shirt.

this is not a god given right, boys.  my skin is mine.  i share it with whom i want, but it is not public land.  you will be asked to earn this privilege.  you will not earn this privilege by talking to me, lamely, for a minute and thirty seconds.  just because you have offered to buy me a drink does not mean i owe you anything.  just because you’ve bought me multiple drinks, which i have consumed, does not mean you get to put your hands just anywhere.

and it is over that fast.  inside four minutes.  before the gin & tonic he has offered to purchase has even been mixed.

it is gratifying, after months of feeling strangely off my game.  i literally run from the bar giggling, feeling more like myself again for the exchange, failed though it might have been.

but still, it is not what i want.  it is a tease.  though, i suppose, you could accuse me of the same.

*

the night ends at veselka with perogi.  it was our own mini epic.  an east village odyssey, with a brief detour into alphabet city.  ten hours, we have been drinking, we have spent weaving paths across the city between bars, between beverages, between encounters both fantasized and real and wonderful and disappointing.

it is probably both dumb and crazy to have stayed out so late, wandered so long, with an impending headcold.

but i am just getting back into the swing of things.  after a dark period where i struggled with my life, my existence.  i am settling into the new job and remembering the things that i loved the before the unhappiness.  the life and the people and the city.

and i love them all again.

and i am ready to find new adventures.  new odysseys of my own.

it is easy to forget where you are.  and why you are there.  because this city is not an accident, ever.  it is an active choice, every day.  it demands of you.  calls upon all your resources–financial, physical, emotional.

but when you remember it is always in a flash of glorious sunlight.  a moment of stunning clarity.  this is perhaps why so many of us stay.  like the girl in the abusive relationship, just when you think the last blow has been struck, he apologizes in the most heart wrenching fashion.  and you believe again.

*

i remembered again yesterday, on the 72nd street transverse.  with the shifting quality of the early fall sunlight on people’s skin.  watching the city breathe in the beginning of the new season.  watching the children careen around on their skateboards and the women on the benches with their bodies thrown open to the new breeze, to the new sun.

remembered again that i was in new york city.  and that i was at home.  remembered again that i loved it.  and that i suspect i always will.

remembered that i wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  that central park is all the nature i need.  that the lirr–despite being horrifying–gets me to the beach.  that i can walk out my door and within blocks have everything i need.  that i can travel a little farther to some of the most recognizable landmarks on earth.  places people fetishize, fantasize about, leave their small towns for the pull of.

*

saturday night i am late.  but in new york this is okay.  this is accepted.  this is expected, even.  i arrive at the bar easily twenty minutes past when i was meant to, a last minute costume change having held me up.  mk is entering immediately ahead of me and lm and bs are already at the bar.  everyone looks so beautiful, perhaps most of all because everyone is in the same place again.  em follows, then kf and bh, and for a moment we squeal like thirteen-year-olds while we hug.

we are celebrating lm & bh’s return.  lm from paris.  bh from london.  its been nine months since i’ve had them both, physically, in my life.  email, blogs, gchat, these are not the same.  not a substitute for a hug.  or for sitting in a bar judging people and downing gin&tonics.

all evening i am texting with nb, who is back home.  she wants to know what i’m doing.  she’s thinking of coming into the city.  and it hits me, as i text the explanation.  this does not happen in most places.  you don’t explain your evening by saying you’re celebrating your friends who have just moved back from europe.  because in most places your friends haven’t been jetting off to europe to live for a while.  perhaps they move to ohio, or north carolina–as friends back home have done–but paris?  london?  this is not normal.

it seems i am most struck by this in election years.  this abnormality of my life, of my entire existence.  living in new york city is like living in some outlying small town.  like m night shayamalan’s village.  but surrounded by it, you begin to believe your life is like the lives others lead.  you are so immersed in it that you lose sight of what is really out there.  that you are the outlier, the statistical anomaly.

this country is not like new york city.  it is a lot more like cheboygan.  or tulsa.  or troy.  people don’t all wing off to europe for a while.  or support gay rights, or have gay friends.  they don’t think twenty dollars for lip gloss is reasonable.  or that fourty dollars for dinner is cheap.

this city changes you.  shifts your perspective.  convinces you it is all, it is everything.  you forget how small it is.

but then, at the strangest times this island reminds you of its size.  that it is a tiny community of one and a half million people, all pressed up against each other in twenty-two square miles.  like when you’re walking down the street and your roommate runs into someone she went to elementary school with.  or you see your freshman year crush from nyu.

or you’re sitting in a bar, celebrating your friends, and someone walks randomly into that bar.  and that someone is a girl who a friend met just that morning at a writing workshop.  and you strike up conversation.  and the new girl introduces you to the friends she has with her.  and you, in turn, introduce those friends to your friends.  and it turns out two of them already know each other.  have a common man in their past.  a friend and an ex, respectively.

and you think to yourself, ‘only in new york.’

only, that’s the kind of thing that happens in cheboygan and tulsa and troy and every other actual small city or town on the face of this earth.  lives are lived together, a communal fabric, studded with common pasts.  that is when new york reminds you that it is of this country, of this world.  and not of the movies, or of your overactive imagination.

that is when it becomes easier to live in this city.  when it feels like a home and not a movie set.  when it feels like a glamorous place where your experience of life is unique in the very best of ways.  not foreign.

that is when it becomes easier to reconcile lives.  a real life and a city life.  to believe that you are not giving up one for the other.

but then.  i always know what my choice is anyway, when it comes down to it.  especially after an early fall sunday spent near bethesda fountain.

new york.

on days like this my face feels like it is going to fall off.  like the pulsing pain in my head will no longer be contained.  it will beat forth, taking half my skull and all of my face with it.

on days like this i need a distraction of a very certain sort.  the sort that is all consuming.  that requires the kind of rapt attention which transports you.  so that you are no longer of your body.  so that you are no longer contemplating the physical aspects of your pain.

this is why, despite the intensity of the ache, i think the theater is still a good idea.

*

bt has red hair like the kind i used to give my characters when i was sixteen years old.  red more like blood than like fire.  more dramatic than mine.  mine is just loud.  hers makes a statement.  on days when i wish to be more brooding and dramatic, more serious, i wish to have hair like hers.

when we spot her, mk and i are standing over the grates outside the nederlander, just like we’ve been told.  just like we’ve been told all five previous raffle attempts.  just like i’ve done thirty some odd times in my life.

we figure, on the sixth try, we’ve got to win.  like our ticket karma has got to be good enough by now.  like someone owes it to us.  i have begun to wonder if i might have used up all my ticket karma back when i was eighteen, nineteen.  back when i never lost.  twenty ticket raffles and i never lost.

yes.  i was that girl.  the girl that the theater staff knew.  who came once every two weeks her freshman year of college.  who cried every time.  who held onto that show like a security blanket as the rest of her world shifted and changed and sometimes fell away.  as she watched buildings fall and lost best friends and struggled to find herself.

our ticket karma remains the same.  we lose, again.  mk and i are unwilling to give up so easily, however.  oh.  and we’re stupid (in a good way, of course).  we purchase tickets, half price.  the woman in the window tells us they are good.  we do not even look.  just pay.  i stuff them into my bag.  like i don’t want to know if they’re good or not, maybe because this is the last time.

hanna has not yet arrived, but she is thick in the air.  our hair stands on end as we wait in line to buy.  the world around us feels soupy as we trek to starbucks.  my docs, which i am still in the proccess of breaking in, are tearing up my heels.  my clothes stick to me as i sweat it out.  i am displeased.  i cannot recall the last time i entered this starbucks, but it was probably with my ex-best-friend, ek.  god.  it was so long ago.  rent was one of the things that held she and i together.  i lost touch with it not long after i lost her.  months, maybe.  but i am back for the last hurrah.

it is different, six years later.  this would, of course, seem logical.  that it would be different.  but nothing about my love for this show was ever logical. nothing about my behavior or my thought process when it comes to this is or ever was logical.

it is like viewing a different show, although i still know every word, mouth along with every line like it is a compulsion.  it is not as though someone has turned the lights on.  that would be too much.  no, it is more like someone has turned off the fog machine.  suddenly, i can see things more clearly.

the cast is not as good as it should be.  mimi looks old, and she doesn’t have the pipes.  collins hasn’t got the pipes either.  roger is seriously miscast.

but this is not why it is different.  this has almost nothing to do with it, in fact.  it is me.  i am different.

part of what i loved so much about this show–what drew me to it, held me to it–was the sense of community.  the sense that my community, my life in new york, would be like this.  filled with beautiful, artistic people, who fought for their art and their love with equal measure.  i believed in rent.  in the story it told.  i believed it was my story, or at least, that it would be my story.  (minus, perhaps the aids and addiction.)

but it has been seven years since i moved to new york.  and i have built my own urban family.  my own community.  my own life.  and there is art and there is love.  but it is not the same.  that new york does not exist anymore.  and perhaps more importantly, that new york never existed for me, not outside the theater.

that was beautiful.  idealized.  it was such a romantic view of what i thought my new york life would be like.

but my real new york life is better.  in so many ways.  it is also different.  the people i have surrounded myself with, the ones who hold the important parts in my libretto, do not fit the molds i believed they would.  we are not starving artists.  we hold jobs without resenting them and pay our bills on time.  bohemia may not be dead, but it is not where we live our lives.  neither is calcutta.

the characters seem more flawed seven years later.  after a long break and a lot of growing and changing.  the life i saw there, the one i thought i wanted to live, is not as glamorous as it once seemed.  without the rose-colored glasses of my teenaged years, everything looks a bit dirtier around the edges.

i still cried, of course.  sobbed would probably be a better word.  it is still beautiful to me. and touching and important.  it is just…no longer mine.  because mine is sitting next to me in the theater, laughing with me about how wonderfully cute angel is.  mine stood on the grate with me six times, waiting for tickets, and shared coffee with me in starbucks.  mine is waiting for me in my apartment uptown, where i can afford to pay the rent.

*

the headache is still there.  when i leave the theater and make my way home, soaked by hanna’s downpour, the headache reminds me of its presence, pulses violently behind my eyes.

when i get home mcm is there, sitting on the couch.  she’s one of the people i saw rent with back then, dozens of times perhaps.  still, i am glad it was mk who i was with this time.  the last time.  like i was walking out of the theater into my new life, instead of still grasping at the old one.

and then there is today.

seven.

when she arrives i nearly trip down the flight of stairs between us, i’m so excited it’s hard to navigate.  she laughs about being sweaty as we hug but i do not care.  it has been years.  seven of them.  a hug is warranted.

later in the weekend we will talk about the last time she came.  it was within weeks of september eleventh.  maybe two weeks.  she describes it.  and how she thought that she might not be able to come back after that.  i think, for the first time, about what that must have been like for her.  i was so damaged by it.  by those days, and weeks and months after.  i will divide my life, forever, into before and after.  but i know my damage.  i know the damage of those around me, who were with me then.  i did not know her damage.  i suddenly feel awful for it, as if it were in my control.  as if i could have changed it.  i cannot even change it for myself.

instantly, it is as though no time has passed.  this is one of my favorite things about good friendships.  time may go by where you are apart. and it may be a very long time, but in the end it matters only slightly.  because you can sit back down next to each other and talk as though it is nothing as all.  the chemistry does not change.  the rapid-fire banter and the laughter and the memories, they are all there.  and you make new memories.  and you share the memories you might have missed in your time apart.

in the end, the time and the distance are only tangential to what you share.

this is a measure of friendship to me.  of its quality and its worth.  these are the people you know you will always have.  i have been lucky to have many of these people in my life.

we laugh our way through an entire weekend, eml and lm and i.  we giggle on the unairconditioned lirr to port jefferson as lm steams in her seat between our two overheating bodies.  and we crack ourselves up with angels and demons and house of dereon as we sit around at the barbecue.  you’d swear we were drunk with the uncontrollable laughter.  it continues straight through the remainder of the weekend.  through the last moments on the lirr back to manhattan, back to our real lives.  to jobs and interviews and dates and different neighborhoods and different cities.

it is good to remind yourself, sometimes, of where you came from.  to laugh about the common past you share with other people.  even when some of it is kind of painful.  kind of awkward.  like the sort of thing you’d never want to live through again.

my teenage years are like that.  there were highlights, to be sure.  there probably always are, always will be.  little flashes of incandescent light shot through the curtain of my adolescence, of my life.  but by and large, those years were brutal, awkward, misunderstood.  all foreign limbs and strange angles and mismatched desires.  they are like my dr. martens.  i asked my parents for the boots and i ended up with the oxfords.  just slightly short of my expectations.

i still have those shoes, although i do not wear them.  they are at once a sure reminder of my history and a painful vessel for the things that didn’t go my way.  when i was twenty-four i bought the boots for myself.  when i was twenty-four i realized i was in control, that i could make things go my way.  that awkward didn’t have to be a part of my life anymore.  not in the same, physical way.  i realized i could file it away.  it was a watershed year.

when lm headed for the subway back to the village and eml got on a bus to the airport, i traipsed home with my luggage.  laughing to myself about the french-fry i’d nearly snorted out my nose in sayville modern diner, driving the staff crazy at twenty-five the same way i drove the staff crazy at sixteen.

it is a continuum.  my past and my present and my future.  i divide it with lines in my head.  but there are people and places and things that transcend.  that will always transcend.

and even when it was easy, even when your parents happily provided you with your beverage of choice, you held it by your side all night long.  perhaps more as a badge of honor than a security precaution.  look, everyone, at what i have in my hands.  at what i will drink tonight before i wake up puking in a bush, proud to be unsure of what may or may not have happened to my body while i was only vaguely conscious.

this is only a snapshot of my seventeen.  there is not even enough film to make a short film, not even enough for a photo-montage.  i did this very rarely in high school.  and even then, only when i was older.  i was what some would call a square.  a goody-two shoes.  as an adult i have leveled with that.  i just had no interest.  neither did my friends.

but there were times when you went to the party with the six-pack, like when your team just won the biggest game, even when it wasn’t your thing.  even when you hated every person in the room.

i cross the green to ab’s co-op, six-pack in hand, and wait patiently while she opens the door.  i take off my shoes just inside, because it is clear this is what we do in her house.  in the house ab owns.  for a moment i feel my age.  only for a moment.

and then i ascend the stairs, and i am in junior high school again.  in my best friend’s apartment.  we are going to stay up all night, drive her parents crazy with our cackling in this two bedroom apartment that seems tiny by comparison to my house.  we will spend hours watching ‘bed of roses’ and twice that amount of time amusing ourselves by having outrageous cyber-sex with men we cannot see, thinking ourselves outrageously funny.  the internet, then, is still new to our households.

for a few moments–as i take the tour, as i pile into the kitchen with the girls, as i rejoin the boys in the living room–it is actually eerie.  i almost feel as if i am doing something wrong, drinking contra-banned substances in my best friend’s parents house.  like if they came out of hiding in the bedroom and saw me, bottle in hand, i would be in so much trouble.  as jb shows me the bathroom, i remember nights spent with my best friend, in tears, on the bathroom floor, crying for all the things that hurt us and held us together.

quickly, the feeling subsides.  this is perhaps because i haven’t eaten dinner and i am drinking quickly.  this is perhaps because the six-pack and the shots do their job.  i do things in this apartment that i never would have done back then, back when i was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.  and that doesn’t even include the drinking.  things like sitting in the kitchen with the women, making guacamole and gossiping about the lives of those we know between us (mostly, of course, about people we knew when).  women socializing in one room, men in another.  again i begin to feel my age.  it begins to show around the edges.  it begins to creep in on us.

half way through the night, as the apartment fills with the boys we socialize with now (the ones we emphatically didn’t socialize with then), i take a break.  ab has cigars from the dominican and the smoke is overwhelming people inside.  i take my cigar outside.

sitting on the balcony, smoking my cigar (expample number sixty seven of something i never did in junior high school, falling right after the drinking and right before the weed), i realize that i can see my former best friend’s parents’ unit.  the very unit i’d been flashing back to all night.  i remember how, just as our friendship was disintigrating junior year, her mother began painting the inside of the apartment to look like a castle.  i remember the books about lizzie borden on the shelves.  and the time we accidentally killed the family guinea pig, oreo, when we left his cage on the balcony in winter.

i think about how much of our lives we’d talked of sharing, this former best friend and i.  the city we’d live in and the weddings we’d have.  we spoke of our lives in terms of what would exist between us, always.  and yet, we never made it past graduation.  i think about how the people i am with now, about how i never would have guessed it was them i’d hold onto.

behind me the gathering is loud.  we must be driving the neighbors crazy as we argue over the merits of the songs we are flipping past on the television.  the alcohol has filled our bloodstreams, dulled our ability to sense or control volume.

i marvel at how far we have come.  for better and for worse.

***

when i was a child (clear through the age of seventeen) we went to church every sunday, my family and i.  by the time i was two, we sat in the front row every single mass.  it was the only place from which i’d pay attention.  if i couldn’t see what was going on, i was kicking and screaming.

case in point: one sunday, a kind woman who sat near our family asked my mother how old i was.  “if she makes to her next birthday, she’ll be two,” my mother replied.  she was considering strangling me in a house of god, just for the silence.

friday afternoon, we are at a restaurant for lunch, my parents and my aunt s &  uncle p and i.  as we sit down to our menus, my mother looks up and notices an elderly lady at a table by herself.  my mother swears it is the same woman who asked how old i was.  who, for many years thereafter, asked my mother if i ever made it past my second birthday.  she does not seem to recognize us.  we wonder what she’d think if she knew.

a few tables away, someone recognizes me.  a young man who i cannot put a finger on, but who knows me well.  he stands to hug me, and it hits like a ton of bricks.  ds.  when he was four, i was his favorite nine year old.  he is now a junior in college.

ds is with both his parents and his younger sister ks.  i babysat ds and ks almost from ks’ birth.  i helped ds with his homework in elementary school.  watched on as he played michael in peter pan, opposite my junior high school crush who played john.  i remember when ks was born.  i remember babysitting on her first night in her big-girl-bed.

ks and i reminisce about that night.  about how she looked up at me, just as i was about to leave her, and turned on the waterworks.  she has the biggest, roundest blue eyes you have ever seen.  it is gutwrenching to see her cry.  for a moment, i almost believed i was scarring her for life.  and maybe i did, after all.  she still remembers the sheets on the bed that night.  bambi.

ks is entering high school this year.  ds is about to leave for his junior year, for his first apartment, for the last few months before his twenty-first birthday.

as we part ways, all back to our own meals, ds says “hey.  next year, we should meet here to have a drink!”

i am traumatized by even the thought.

***

i scarcely notice the passage of time in myself.  i’d like to believe this is because, for me, time is not passing.  i’d like to believe i will eternally be youthful, with tight skin and energy to burn and my own teeth in my head.

but time passes for those around me.  my little brother graduates from college, he gets engaged.  my cousin d has facial hair to shave and a girlfriend in texas to whisper with on the phone.  ks enters high school, her big-girl-bed a phenomenon of the distant past.

i know this means i am growing up too.

i wonder if this means that, at some point, i’ll have to figure things out.

and then i wonder if that isn’t part of the journey always.  and i wonder what i’d figure out anyway.

i have thought about these things a lot lately.

the words are back.  i am writing again.  and i write, always, about myself.  fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction.  there is me, always me.  i document.  i tweak.  i revise.  but it is always my existence.  i am woven in every word, and not just because i am the one who wrote them.

so in writing again, i am there again.  on the page.  and so are my friends, and perhaps more importantly, so is my family.

c and i tell these stories about our family.  they are not funny, but they are funny.  we make them funny.  because with a big family like ours, you have to laugh at it.  otherwise you’ll resent it.  and when we tell them–the blood soaked basketball games, the ‘puff daddy is a criminal’ dinner conversations, the uncles who cannot be in the same room together–people always say “you should write a book.”

and i am.  writing a book, that is.  or many.  i’m not sure yet.

my senior year of college i figured it out.  my first book of poetry would be about family.  about my family.  i was struggling with what to write, forced to produce poem after poem for class, more than one a week.  and then suddenly, there they were, poem after poem about family.  it started with one about greece and my cousins there, and how i hated everything.  and it just snowballed.  my grandmother.  my great grandmother.  my uncles.  anger.  hatred.  the things we give each other.  the things we do to each other.  those poems are on a hard drive, waiting for their compilation.

and today, again, there it is.  the family.  in the poetry, in the fiction.  in everything.

and again, there is the struggle.  how can you be honest?  how can you even come tangentially close to honesty in your writing, without hurting the people around you?  and what is your responsibility…where does it lie?  with the people?  or with the words?  and are you willing, then, to risk either one?  because finishing that book of poetry, or publishing it, will mean risk.  will mean choice.

but then.  if you are true to yourself as a writer.  the words are there.  and erasing them, or putting them in a box in the back of your closet, or removing them from your blog…does that make them go away?  does that change anything?  because you have already thought them, and written them, and lived with them in you and around you.  haven’t they already done their damage?

*

i am upset.  and i want to write about it.  because this will help me understand it.  and feel better about it.  and file it in my past where it belongs.  but the internet is more permanent than it seems.  more risky.  it is as bad as hardcover, bound, on a shelf.

sure, with the internet you can erase.  you can delete the post later.  but once its been read, it is out there.  like the terrible epilogue to a series of books you loved, you cannot eradicate what you already know.  or what other people already know.

and so i will wait.  will hold the nebulous feeling of apprehension in my stomach.  the hurt and the fear and the regret and the simmering anger.  i will keep them all inside me.  save them for a day when they are safe to say.  when i can package them properly.

or for a day when i’ve decided what i choose.  the words.  or the family.  or myself.

it is just after six am and i am alone on route twelve.  mornings make me miserable.  but humidity makes life unbearable at any other time of day.  and takes about 20 seconds off my mile time.  so i run as the sun is rising.  trying to clear my head of all the noise back in the house.

we are in north carolina.  and by we, i mean my father’s entire family.  all six of his siblings and their spouses and ten of their children and r’s fiance, k.  only z is missing.  there are twenty-five of us, total, if my math is correct.  and we are all under one roof.  we have never tried this before as a family and this trip will determine if we ever try this again.  i have learned not to hold out hope.

there is love here, to be sure.  lots of it.  and loyalty in extreme measure.  and yet, there is anger.  so much of it bubbling, just barely contained by the surface of the viscous liquid, always ready to burst out.  these are people who…you could not harm any one of us without all twenty-four others flying wildly to our defense.  but we do plenty of harm to each other.  constantly.  we love each other.  and many of us hate each other in equal measure.  there is too much damage from the nuclear fallout of childhood.  mismatched memories, bitterness, resentment.

the fighting begins on the first night.  four of the brothers shouting about affirmative action into the middle of the night.  always formulating their next tragically insightful comment instead of listing to the conversation they are supposedly responding to, participating in.  it continues, of course, through every moment of the next two days, bits and pieces of it returning to be paired with other (entirely unrelated) barbs.  we fight over who remembers what correctly, who is wrong, who is right, who has been the most abused over the past 59 odd years of this family’s existence.  we compete about who has been in the most pain, and who has been the most successful and we disparage each other’s accomplishments at every possible juncture.  we must always have the last word.  all of us.  it never ends.

it is stressful.  i want the anger to end.  and even though i know it won’t–it is too ingrained in us now, too much a part of how we relate to each other–i cannot stop myself from always trying to stop it.  i worry all the time.  attempt to diffuse.  most women in this family do.  the wives and the daughters and the lone sister.  this is our burden.  even those of us with the genetic predisposition to join right into arguments.  to try and win them.  what is it about women?  that allows us to stop ourselves?

i wonder, often, if we will survive this week.  which sounds silly.  but what i know of family…it can fall apart.  permanently.  even over something small, insignificant, silly.

we stand, like that house, a romantic vision of family.  beautiful from the outside, all of us here together.  patched together haphazardly by a past we all share.  we are balconies hanging over bluffs, supported by sheer will, nothing but sky between us and the sand.  always on the precipice of a terribly unromantic collapse.