Awkwardly Social

A year ago I was sitting at Tara’s house crying my eyes out because my boyfriend at the time and I had put the final straw on the back of our relationship.  The Christmas photo.

Louie is a Jew.  Also, he’s kind of an asshole when it comes to people taking his picture.  Or, at least, he was kind of an asshole that day.  All I wanted was a simple fucking picture of him, me and our dog so my mom could take down the random photo she had of us and put up a photo I actually liked.

God, he was such a dick that day.

The next morning he broke up with me.  Told me he was moving out that day.  That it was over.  It was.  But that night, this night one year ago, I came home from Tara’s house, my eyes red, drunk, and furious, and didn’t even look at him.  I didn’t want to see him.  I wanted to leave him.  I went to bed and he slept on the couch.  He never once had slept on the couch, so I knew he was pissed, but at the time I thought he had no right to be pissed.  This year of reflection and some kind of sideways reconciliation with him has taught me that boy oh boy there were certainly two of us in that relationship and whenever you have two people telling a story there are dramatically different versions.  Louie is probably going to read this.  And to him I can finally, a year later, say, “Thanks, man.  You did me right.”

So now here I am. I’m sitting in my office typing these words, drinking from a heavy leaded crystal glass that was given to my boyfriend by another woman.  A married woman.  A woman who in the recent past has tried to get my boyfriend to go on expensive vacations with her.  A woman he’s having dinner with next week. I wish it didn’t bother me the way Louie’s female friends didn’t bother me, but it does.  And I’m fighting the urge to throw this glass against the wall.  It probably wouldn’t break anyway.

Here’s to a year gone.  A new year coming.  A break up. And a glass I’m not going to break.

We were walking the dog around our block. It was cold and I was getting lovingly scolded for not wearing socks.  These are how our plans are made.  We walk around the block, and Mr. F tells me I’m dressed ridiculously and then we decide to go to Santa Fe.

So we went home, booked some tickets and found a hotel.  Then we decided we wanted to stay in Taos instead.  And go skiing.  Which is when I started getting nervous.  My last snow sports adventure with a boyfriend ended in a lot of wrenched muscles and hurt feelings when I got abandoned on a mountain with a snowboard and no clue how to ride the stupid thing.  I ended up unhooking the strap thingies from my feet and walking down, much to the chagrin of every other person on the hill that day.  That boyfriend didn’t last another month.

I explained all of this to Mr. F, saying I would happily try to ski, but that the last time I swooshed down a mountain on skis I was about seven years old.  He told me he didn’t give a shit about double black diamonds and that he’d happily hang out on the bunny slope all day with me.

I might have pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.  Whenever he says the perfect thing, which is just about every time he opens his mouth, I can’t help but think I’ve somehow been tricked.  That this is all a big joke.  Especially since in two days, I’ll be un-celebrating the anniversary of the day Louie dumped me.  And you’re wondering how you un-celebrate something.  Fuck if I know.

Ahem.  Moving on.

(Literally!)

I got an e-mail this morning from Mr. F and it said something like, “Can’t wait for Taos.” And at first I thought it said, “Can’t wait for Tacos.”  Which was confusing at 9:00AM, but then again, it wasn’t.

Either way, Taos, tacos, bunny slopes, black diamonds, I can’t wait.

His hair is dark in the pictures he’s showing me. His skin unwrinkled. It’s him, but I don’t know this version. He has a mustache and there’s a self portrait of him in the mirror with his camera. It’s a photo I’ve taken of myself, you’ve taken of yourself, everyone who has ever held a camera and had a mirror has taken this photo. And there he is staring into the mirror decades before we’ll meet, and I don’t know this part of him, the young part, the part before he had kids and a wife and a house in the hills.

He flips casually past another picture but I catch a glimpse of her. She is on her stomach on the beach, in a bikini. He doesn’t show me, but doesn’t hide it from me either, he shows me the next photo in the bunch, it’s him the same day, the same beach, holding his infant son. She probably took the photo.

I start to close up. Close off. I want him to put the photos away but he hasn’t seen the blinds being drawn and he holds up a contact sheet. He points to a young woman with long blond hair. It’s the late 60s. I’m not even born. She’s not the mother of his children. He says, “God, she had great hair.” And she did. But I can’t admit it.

He finally puts the photos away and I get up with the weight of all the long lost women pulling my limbs down. I move to the kitchen, Lula’s nails clicking behind me. I make the coffee for the morning. I brush my teeth. I put on my pajamas. I wonder if I’m being ridiculous for feeling so lost in the sea of his memories that don’t include me.

He pulls me close and tells me he shouldn’t have shown them to me. It makes me feel even worse that I can’t handle a simple pile of pictures. He tells me that he just wanted to share them with me. I start to cry.

This morning, with his body wrapped around mine I tell him that I don’t want to be the end. He doesn’t understand that I’m picturing the last sad piece of stale bread in the bag. The heel. He says he likes the heel. I tell him no one likes the last piece of bread, it sits in there until someone has enough energy to just throw it out. The analogy is slipping. It’s a bad metaphor. I can’t help but laugh. Laughing is contagious when your bodies are close. He tells me I’m the best heel. The only heel. We’re laughing under the covers and the woman in the bikini and the girl with the long blond hair seem like a stupid reason to be sad.

My alarm goes off for the last time and I swing my legs out of bed, slip my feet into the Uggs he insists I wear around our cold house, Lula insanely scrabbling around, and I open the front door, the sun is doing that post card thing it does on cloudy days where the rays burst through and make you think someone is responsible for the pretty light show. And for some reason, watching Lula sniff every inch of the wet grass looking for the perfect place to pee with the cold air rosing my cheeks, I feel wrapped up and warm. And even though the metaphor is confusing, not unlike a fresh loaf of bread.

Bad news - I am depressed.  Good news - when I’m sad, ideas form, scenes for my script come to me, my index cards fill, and writing gets done.  I hate being depressed, but I love writing.  I want to figure out a way to have both happiness and words on pages but so far I haven’t been able to get those two worlds together.

Mr. F is the only bright spot these days, and while that’s a lot of pressure to put on a single human, being the only good thing in a person’s life, he’s handling it well.

Good news - we got our table and it is gorgeous, one can’t argue with French craftsmanship of the 1830s it seems.  Bad news - it’s kind of small and we have no chairs.

Good news - Lula is no longer peeing swimming pools on the service porch.  Bad news - she now has a nasty, hacking cough that I believe is her pathetic attempt to see the awkward low talking vet again because she has a crush.

Good news - I am not pregnant.  Bad news - I am not pregnant. It’s complicated.  I don’t want to be pregnant right now, but I want to have Mr. F’s baby eventually.   Apparently, I am not immune to the cliche of biological clock ticking.  And while irritating, it’s always reassuring to know I’m a pretty norml human after all.

Good news - my life with Mr. F is getting better every day.  And there really is no bad news about that.

As I was driving home I hovered at a stop light, a small rise in front of me, and then a dramatic dip beyond it showing off the crooked towers of Century City.  It was a dark clear night with a crispness to the air that we find so cold and wintery here in the Southwest.  The radio was on, and Nirvana was playing.  My feet caressed the clutch in and the brake on stopping me from my slight rocking back and I thought of the way it felt to first learn to drive, all those hundreds of years ago.  And how far away it all seemed, but how one slight rise in the road could bring it all flooding back.

My father insisted I learn to drive a manual transmission before an automatic. We had a big field behind our house and I would drive our yellow Volvo station in circles, shifting from first to second, stalling incessantly, getting hot and dusty in the only car in Arizona with rust creeping around the edges of the frame and no air conditioning. Finally after watching me do circles in a sad little field my dad took pity on me and told me it was time to take a trip around the block.

I thought he was going to pull the car out of the field for me, there was a steep hill that you had to drive up to get to our dusty ungrated dirt road. He told me I had to learn sometime. I can still feel the way the gravel slipped beneath the tires and gave way as I tried to gun it up the steep grade out onto the dirt road that ran in a mile long loop around our subdivision. I might be remembering wrong but I made it out on the first try.

I spent that afternoon driving around our block. Something every kid dreams about learning how to do.  Or at least every kid who wants to learn to drive.

We had one wicked hill in town with a stop sign at the very top.  Every day at 3:02PM traffic at that stop sign would back up all the way down Pecan Lane as kids and teachers and buses would line up and wait to make it onto General Crook Trail.   It was murder if you were a kid with a manual and a father who told you using the emergency brake was for pussies.  I never once stalled on that hill, much to my own surprise.

The light changed on Olympic Blvd. and I dropped Afnuf into 1st, cruising back to home in Silver Lake, all those miles away from a tiny town in rural Arizona, and I thought even though I hate being stuck in brutal Los Angeles traffic with a stick shift, I love being transported back to a time when all I ever worried about was making it up CV hill without stalling my Subaru.