I miss winter. I miss getting drunk with you on blue Long Island iced teas, me on one and a half and you on probably four and a few beers. I miss fighting with you about how you’d put Samantha Morton at number 14 on your potential wife list even though I’m numbers 1 through 13 as we walk down Madison Avenue. I miss screaming drunkenly at you when you try to hold my hand. I miss you trying to steal my phone from me on the corner as I call my best friend to tell her what was happening. I miss the alcoholic haze that makes a New York January seem nonexistent. I miss holding my coat way out with my hands and trying to drunkenly convince the hostess at that restaurant to let me use the bathroom since “the baby was pressing down on my bladder”. I miss arguing as we bought hot dogs and cheese fries from the Jamaican men on the corner. I miss them laughing at us as we slurred at each other. I miss refusing to speak to you while pleading for you to eat so you’d sober up. I miss staggering down the stairs to the 1 train and letting you sit next to me with rolled eyes. I miss you spilling the cheese fries down the front of your jacket. I miss the way we laughed about it and how you tried to kiss me with a literally cheesy mouth. I miss the way how I said sorry for being a lightweight kamikaze by taking off my glove and putting my hand in yours. I miss the way you let me know it was okay and that you were sorry by rubbing the palm of my hand with your finger. I miss sharing the headphones to my iPod to listen to Talking Heads on the way back to the Bronx. I miss an empty subway car and how when we were almost to 231st street, we attempted to swing around the poles. I miss the look on your face when I wrapped one boot around it and twisted around. I miss walking home in the cold against you. I miss the way we drunkenly mumbled about the future and how we wanted to get married one day; I miss the way we didn’t even try to take it back the next day. I miss being too drunk to have sex but not so much that we didn’t try. I miss sleeping skin to skin and the snow and rubbing my foot against yours to help me fall asleep and our alternating breaths and slowing heartbeats and good night.

Re: The Idiots Who Continue On About The So-Called ‘World Trade Center’ Mosque

klendathudrop:

As a New Yorker, I am ashamed that this remains a popular conversation topic amongst the media, politics, and retarded laymen. This is one big heaping slice of non-issue. The building in question would be a sorely-needed community center, TWO BLOCKS AWAY from the WTC disaster, with swimming pools and a library. It has zero relevance to the World Trade Center bombings, and to imply otherwise is naked racism. And lest we forget: the building is PRIVATELY OWNED, and it is unconstitutional in EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD for the government to tell the property owners what to do with their own PRIVATELY OWNED PROPERTY.

This matter has been distorted not only by politicians using 9/11 as political tool to rally support, but also by COMPLETELY OBVIOUS RACISTS spreading non-truths like the opening of the mosque being on SEPTEMBER 11TH and, for non-NYers unaware of the geography of the area, the lie that it is being BUILT ON THE REMAINS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACKS. People who say these things are not entitled to their opinion because they are RACISTS trying to SPREAD HATE, and should NOT BE TOLERATED, whether they are FRIEND, FAMILY or CO-WORKER.

Please reblog so that some people can realize how ugly they’re being.

This is why I love my boyfriend. Also, yep, he tumbls, mostly about movies, occasionally just to drop truth bombs.

So this is from an old Daily News but they have these ads in probably every Thursday, Friday, and probably the weekend editions of the paper. I act like a fucking idiot whenever I see these ads. Michelle and I had discussed over brunch this need we had to have a puppy and nurture it and take care of it, like this strong pull towards puppies and it’s so, so true. It’s some fucked up biological clock replacing babies with puppies.

I know what you’re thinking. Oh, whatever. Everyone loves puppies and they cuddle them and squeal and coo over them. Yay. Puppies.

No.

Lately, it’s like weird, creepy hormonal clockwork. I see this ad and I lose my shit. I’m pretty much always reading the paper on the subway and then I see this ad and I grip the paper tighter as if the 2D puppies are going to escape from the fucking page. “Oh no, puppies, stay right here beneath this story about some girl blogger eating from food trucks oh wait do not care!” I can always feel my nails turning slight blue underneath my nail polish at how hard I’m gripping the pages. My mouth erupts into one of those eyesore grins you only see on 5-year-olds who haven’t learned how to not use every facial muscle to convey joy. Some of these ads literally say this:

SO MANY WRINKLES!!!

Indeed. So many damn wrinkles. When I read that and see the wrinkly puppies, I make some sort of noise that can only be translated into text like this:

EEEahafnoaiJJKNNKFJND.

Then whoever is near me looks at me like I am suffering a seizure or am slightly mentally retarded but no one gives a shit; it’s New York City. I sort of sit for several minutes laughing and keeping my now melted heart in my chest as I just repeat the brilliance of SO MANY WRINKLES to myself. If Gabe is with me, he usually kisses me at this point to try and snap out of my puppy rapture but I am just mumbling SO MANY WRINKLES against his mouth. I am always excited about dogs on the street but something about this ad kills me. It’s so honest, it just automatically plugs into what is loved about puppies:

· WRINKLES

· Puppy faces

· WRINKLES

· Not poop

So if you see a girl reading a paper on the subway or while walking down the street and she suddenly seems to go into shock or is apparently impersonating Jack Nicholson’s Joker, do not fret and let her ride it out. Soon she will only be repeating SO MANY WRINKLES in her head.

All day long.

Here is a list of things that can make your period late and/or disappear:

1. Stress

2. Screwing up the last week of your birth control pill dosage

3. A combination of the above

4. A baby

I always think I’m pregnant, I have a sort of paranoia about it and I blame it on the Discovery Channel and this one documentary about parasites. One poor, poor woman had some sort of tapeworm creature that had to be removed from her very swollen abdomen and from that moment, my brain clicked and just permanently associated it with a baby growing inside me, eating all of my delicious omelets and fruit cups. I’m the kind of girl who cures anxiety by taking a pregnancy test because “at least I’m the boss of my uterus,” as I always say.

This was different though. I didn’t say anything to Gabe, who looked greenly pale for someone so ethnic, as I picked up the test at the drugstore. Our neighborhood had turned into fucking Baby Town. I kid you not. Our coffeeshop, our grocery stores, our quiet lovely treelined streets had been taken over by tiny, beautiful newborns in spacecraft-resembling stroller contraptions. We even joked about a possible Law & Order-inspired procedural called Baby Town with toddler DA’s and a baby drug dealer who said “goo goo ga ga!” while smoking a doobie (it’s funnier when I act it out). I love babies but on the brink of my final undergrad year and about to dive into preparing and applying for some sort of grad or law school, I do NOT need something else attached to my tits.

The final straw was when I threw up in Starbucks. I sat down and thought that there really was something in my uterus who did not like chicken masala and naan and who was now calling the shots. I bought the test and we walked home making jokes that weren’t funny at all. It was so fucking hot outside. I got home and took off my jeans and underwear, rifling through my bag for the test in just my baseball tee. I stalked off to the bathroom and locked myself in. I MacGyvered this cup-shaped top from your shaving cream into my official pee cup and dipped both sticks into it. I waited. Three minutes is a long time, so much longer than you ever think it is. Those three minutes are like the suspended animation that Captain America exists in post-World War II or something.I used the time to stick my head out the door.

“Hey, if you see the cap of your shaving cream in the trash, don’t take it out,” I said.

“What did you say?” You were reading the Daily News.

“The cap to your shaving cream. Just, you know, don’t use it again.”

You looked at me for a bit with a weird half smile.

“I PEED IN IT DO NOT USE IT JESUS.” I slammed the door and locked myself into the bathroom to continue waiting.

We always say we don’t want kids; they’re so expensive, loud, we’d never sleep in, all of the things lots of people say, things I actually believe. But we talk about baby names and I’ve come around on Thor (only as a middle name) and you hate Poppy with a passion but will let me have a Bianca. We talk but it’s not time, if ever. I stare at the edge of the sink and the first one has one line.

Not pregnant.

A few seconds later, the second one reads “-NO.” As in, no, continue on being selfish and put your life together and one day, this won’t only give you terror but perhaps something else, something more joyful. I walked out of the bathroom holding the two tests and stood in the doorway of the living room. You looked up at me expectantly and I gave you my best terrified/I just shit my pants (I haven’t, for the record, but thespian!) face.

“JK!” I said and dropped the tests in the trash. There was and is time for all the things we do and don’t want, and those things will probably change with time. What doesn’t? I curled up next to you and felt you absentmindedly place your hand on my lower abdomen as we read the sports section together.

—

When something is right, it’s as simple as you like seeing your toothbrushes together in the morning. That’s really it.

There is much to report from Florida but for now I just want to take a moment to document this which so perfectly represents most things about my life. For those of you who are new to this blog and subsequently my life, I apologize in advance; get out while you can.

Scenes from a Saturday

I went to the bakery on the corner that I’ve been dying to walk into for months. The cakes in the window are beautiful, actually attractive the way a date would be, and they call my name daily. I walked in and was overwhelmed in the same way I would be at Toys ‘r Us as a kid. I’d hold my hand up to my mom.

“Just give me a minute, I can’t decide,” I’d say with a raise of my eyebrows.

I said the same thing to one of the women behind the counter. I asked her what each tiny tart and cake was, what the filling was, whether the icing was buttercream or whipped. She looked very impatient but there were no other customers so she humored me. I set a limit at twenty dollars because otherwise I’d need a caravan to help me carry home boxes and boxes of dessert. They tied the box tightly with string the way all good bakeries do and I set it on my lap on the train.

When we got above ground at Dyckman Street, the girl sitting across from me on the train took her cell phone out to make a call. She spoke in Spanish and I understood every word, looking down to avoid appearance of eavesdropping. There was a lovely blue and white gemstone Star of David around her rather short neck. She hung up and I looked up at her gingerly.

“Are you Hispanic?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said with an accent and a smile much friendlier than I am used to on the subway. “Mexican. Can’t you tell?”

“I just hate to make assumptions just because you were speaking Spanish.” I looked at her necklace. “I just saw your necklace and was surprised, I don’t know many other Hispanic people who are Jewish. Even though I’m just part Jewish.”

“Is this Jewish?” She fingered the necklace gently. “I used to be a nanny for a family in Riverdale and the mother gave it to me. I just thought it was a star.”

I thought about the people who have worn that star whether by force or choice and I realized how simple it really was.

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

She got off at 207th street and smiled at me as she stepped through the closing doors.

—

We ate Mediterranean  food and dessert with the same forks and talked quietly about our days. You were glad Michelle wasn’t an internet predator; I noted the irony to myself. I listened to you with a mouth full of falafel. We fell asleep on the couch and soon stumbled to bed, stiff with the day, asleep before midnight and comfortable in the notion that we are young and old all at once.

Note to self: when your boyfriend promises he won’t make fun of you if you tell him which Bravo reality shows you watch, it’s a LIE.

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

The magic of crashing stars and chutes and ladders

Forgive me for sounding naive but I always forget how fucking exhausting kids are. Gabe and I spent the weekend with his family and especially his little niece and nephew, girl age 3 (almost 4), and boy 1 and a half. I’m an only child, only grandchild mostly and I always try to mentally (and physically) prepare myself for being around little ones but it’s like I’ve come to assume that I get what it’ll be like being with kids for more than a few hours. Overnight. Days. Every single time, I think I know what I’m getting myself into because I so love watching my favorite writers and bloggers with their little ones (here are some of my favorite mom and dad bloggers-look for your name, hey!) and I think I’ve garnered enough info and facts to successfully rein in and understand these little ones I adore.

Hahahahahahahaahahahahaha. I never have a clue.

THEY’RE SO SMART. I’m not shocked by this but I AM. I’m not going to lie to you, I think some kids are sort of obnoxious but the good ones, man, they’re the best. These two, they are such characters at such young ages. I last saw them at Easter and they’ve grown inches in such a short time! The little boy was soft and still in that baby stage then and now he’s taller, running all over, getting into everything, and losing that baby stance of back arc-tummy out. Even his face looks more like a little boy, not as round. His mom pointed out with a sad face that he only had one roll in his thighs now. He kissed me goodnight and would look at me for long stretches of time before bringing me his toys shyly; he’d then try to get into cabinets and test his voice and all his big boyness.

The other one had grown taller, all jumping, prancing little girl, and she is so, so lovely. The best thing about her though is her mind. A few weeks away from being 4 years old, she is so smart and so verbal and sassy. Not bratty but already a fully-formed little human. She wore me out physically, attempting to play badminton and “valleyball” and hide and seek, but mentally as well, trying to read me storybooks and making up elaborate games for her dolls. We spent a lot of time in the above playroom which also has her brother’s toys but is still a very HER zone as he moves out of his baby years.

I sat crisscross applesauce on the floor with her and looked at the drawings and coloring book pages torn out and baby dolls and princess dolls and Dora dolls and I wondered if I had been like this as a little girl. My mother assured me a few days later that I absolutely was as energetic but I can’t remember a time when my mind seemed to brimming with so much joy and energy and possibility and creation. I still burst at the seams with these sensations but it seems muted and slowed down by the mundane details of every day life. There are glimpses of the old exhilaration at times, when your hand brushes the small of my back, when I’m riding a bicycle downhill, when I hear a song I know all the words to, when I think of the perfect turn of phrase for a story, when you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cut it in half diagonally how I like it just because. Both of these little ones reminded me of how much I have and how little living I sometimes do because of my own fears and insecurities. There is such pleasure in doing the things that make you happy, the way children do, and I wonder why we don’t do this more when we grow up.

We came home tired after just a weekend. I lied on the bed and wondered how moms and dads do what they do, 24 hours a day. I don’t say this for sympathy but I really wonder if I could do what you do, without a break. I wonder if I have knowledge to impart, if I’d be a mom a little boy or girl could look up to, if I’d be able to keep an eye on the dangers seen and unseen. In a day and age where speed and efficiency is so highly valued, I am in awe of parents who not only watch their babies grow up in what is seemingly hyperspeed but who also have to be so patient with those little ones simultaneously. I don’t know if I’d be a good mom at all. I do know that I love the smell of baby feet and the tiny arms of little kids wrapped around my waist but I wonder if that’s enough. I’m selfish and set in my ways. I wonder if there’s enough love for all of us.

I see you with these little ones, holding them, making them laugh, and I know that anything is possible in time. Perhaps.

Being without internet at home is odd, very Oregon Trail.

As my friend Garland Grey says “Everybody sucks but us”. Real update soon.

Ghost City

I’m beginning to think that blogging, and writing to some extent, involves muscles that get underused when you take any kind of break from it. Living causes layers of fat to grow over and you become comfortable in the other things you’re doing but when the itch returns, it takes a little bit longer to get going than you’d expect and like. This combined with the heat, even from eleven stories up, makes my mind still. I read books while standing directly in front of the AC. My feet move in the positions I know from ballet: first through fifth, tendu devant. I wear sundresses without undergarments or I wear nothing at all. I wilt by midmorning.

Something falls in the bathroom on Sunday afternoon and we both run to see. I am on your heels to see my shaving gel rolling in the bathtub. We stare out the bathroom window as the wind whips the rain against our faces. It’s shockingly cold. I step on the edge of the tub to pull the window closed and we go back to reading in bed. There’s a noise in the living room but I know every single window is closed in there. I can only imagine my face.

“It’s a ghost,” you say. You grin.

“Shut up.” It’s not funny nor is it ever funny.

The first house I ever lived in, where my parents brought me to from the hospital, was mostly brown. It was a ranch style house and it sat on the corner of a quiet street. There was a long, wide driveway paved with black asphalt and a two car garage which we always used instead of the front door. It had four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a big kitchen, and a vast backyard with orange and lime trees. My mom planted roses that bloomed pink and cream, and we barbecued on weekends. It was a perfect house for a family of three and we were very happy there for a while.

I first slept in a Moses basket by my parents’ bed and then in a crib in my nursery. When it came time for my first big girl bed, the nursery became a playroom and the spare bedroom became a brand new room for me. I slept in the canopy bed with Little Mermaid sheets but I still spent afternoons playing in the nursery, where my toys slept. I solved puzzles, had tea parties with Mr. Potato Head, and listened to Sesame Street books on a tape recorder on my own a lot but when you’re little, you don’t notice the solitude as much; when you’re an only child, you notice even less.

My parents played with me as well but it is more important to this story when they didn’t. On her own, a little girl of five doesn’t find it odd when the closet doors in her nursery open and close by themselves or that toys would fall right off shelves without being pushed or being on the edge. It’s not until this is mentioned to someone who knows better that this is seen as strange at all.

“There’s a dark thing in the corner when I go to sleep, Mommy.”

“Dark thing?” She looked in the rearview mirror at me in my carseat. “I’m sure it’s just a shadow, sweetheart.”

I knew shadows from dancing with them on the sidewalk; this was no shadow.

The doors continued to open and close on their own and I tried to ignore them. I kept my eyes on Barbie’s Corvette as I felt them open. They would close a few minutes later as Barbie drove down the carpeted road. If I ever tried to look up quickly, they would slam suddenly. I learned this when I sat directly in front of them one day and looked up. They closed quickly and on my fingers. I screamed in pain and my mom came running. She couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell her through my tears. I slept in between my parents that night.

I dragged my mom back to the nursery the next day. She indulged my needy behavior and helped me assemble the train set my aunt had sent me. I grabbed her by the leg when she tried to leave. She looked at me curiously while she played with me.

“You’re so quiet today,” she said, unused to an almost silent five-year-old.

“We have to listen,” I said. My eyes were only half-raised.

She looked at me strangely but for some reason didn’t ask. She smiled that mom smile that’s supposed to radiate steadiness; her eyes crinkled a bit. We linked the train cars as I heard the hinges creak as they usually did. I grabbed her hand.

“Don’t look all the way up,” I whispered, as if varnished wood and hinges could hear me.

They opened on cue and I squeezed my mom’s hand. I heard her inhale sharply. I’m not sure if she followed my directions or she just couldn’t move. The doors closed calmly a few moments later. She was crying.

“How did you,” she sobbed. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t, Mommy. It does it every day.” I let go of her hand and realized I was shaking on my own.

“I need to call your father.” Her breath was jagged.

She stood and picked me up as she walked out of the room. At five, you don’t get carried as often so I was secretly pleased about this. She went into her bedroom and shut the door. Picking up the cordless phone, she took me into the bathroom with her. She dialed my dad’s office as she looked through a drawer. I could hear the dialtone as she took a deep breath from her inhaler. He picked up and she told him what happened while trying to breathe. She paced back and forth in front of me as she spoke.

“No, you don’t understand, no one was touching them. I have no fuc-no clue.” She looked at me apologetically for the slip.

She gasped for air with her inhaler as my dad’s voice calmly tried to rationalize what had happened to her. He somehow convinced her that everything was fine and they soon hung up. She put the phone back on the charger and walked me into the backyard. She sat on one of the swings of my jungle gym. I sat on the swing next to hers but didn’t get very high at swinging by myself. I knew better than to ask her to push me right then. She stared at the house while the bar above us creaked with the swinging. Mosquitoes bit our ankles but we stayed outside until my dad got home. That night, we all slept in the same bed again.

My parents moved all of my toys into my bedroom the next morning. I was not to go into the nursery anymore for any reason. The door remained permanently closed, opening only for the cleaning lady who vacuumed it weekly while I was at school. My parents regularly popped their heads when I played by myself or did the homework that came with first grade a year later. Things improved somewhat and none of us mentioned what had happened. We avoided the topic as we did the room, ignoring the times when we did hear the click of the closing doors.

On a Wednesday, my mom picked me up from school. It was one of the days I didn’t have ballet class and so we went directly home. The garage door opener didn’t work no matter how many times my mom pushed the button. She frowned and we walked up the stone path past the pink and cream roses to the front door. My mom searched for the house key on her key ring as I played with the straps of my backpack. She turned the key and unlocked it, the door falling slightly open. I stared at our neighbor walking his dog while she picked up her briefcase and turned. Her breath caught and I turned towards the door as she screamed.

One perfectly straight row of Mexican tiles had uncemented itself from the floor. Each tile, installed before I was born six years before, stood on its side and led directly towards the end of the house where my bedroom and nursery were. My stomach turned as I stared.

My mom was still screaming a full minute later. She picked me up and ran to the car. She left the front door wide open. We reversed out of the driveway and somehow made it to my grandma’s house. My mom was wild-eyed by the time my grandma opened her front door. I was scooped away to the kitchen by my grandpa while my grandma tried to get my mom to say anything more than the word tile. She took charge and called my dad and my uncle, both of whom arrived within the hour. My uncle, the physician, sedated my hysterical mother while my dad held her hand.

“I am never going back to that house,” she moaned to my dad drowsily as the sedative took effect.

And she never did, and I never did. My dad and grandpa were commercial contractors and they, along with several architects, could find nothing wrong with the foundation of the house to cause the tile to react in such a way. A crew of eight men had to jackhammer the tile out in order to put new wood floors in; however, the varnish never quite set.

My dad is not one to believe in anything besides what he can see and touch in front of him. He was baffled. I imagine he hired paranormal investigators mostly for my mom but a bit for his own curiosity. His tax writeoffs for 1992 include “ghostbusters” as he called them. I never saw the people who entered our house with gadgets and touched our not yet dusty belongings to get a feel for the place. They stayed overnight with my dad and concluded that we had a poltergeist. He laughed as he wrote them a check but stiffened at their final piece of advice.

“Do not bring your little girl back into this house.” He silently watched them drive off.

We all stayed with my grandparents for six months. My parents put our house on the market and began searching for a new one. It sold quickly to a divorced man who did not believe in anything supernatural. My dad supervised movers as they packed every clock radio, book, sandal, picture frame, doll, fork in the house. A priest and a rabbi blessed our new house while we waited in the driveway. We only made our way inside after they exited safely. Nothing strange ever happened in that house except for the dissolution of a marriage and a family.

I moved from a dorm into my boyfriend’s apartment into my own apartment when I was 20. That first house sticks in the back of my mind whenever I move or even when I walk into someone else’s home for the first time and as the sun set on my first night in that one bedroom corner apartment, I knew I could not sleep yet. I drove to the Catholic church on University Avenue and tried every locked door of the perimeter. I banged on the rectory door as it began to rain. A priest with a loosened collar opened the door and let me in as he looked at me oddly.

“I just moved into an apartment today and I can’t sleep until it’s blessed or given the okay or whatever.” I felt my bangs dripping.

“Well, I can’t bless it for you at this hour but I can give you holy water.”

“Tomato, tomahto.” My inner Catholic schoolgirl grinned.

He led me through a back hallway and we found ourselves in a room behind the altar. He correctly assumed I didn’t bring a bottle and he filled up a holy water bottle and a smaller vial for me. I thanked him with a damp handshake and braved the rain home. I soon stood in my doorway and squeezed the plastic bottle of holy water in the general direction of the room. I knew I should say something in accompaniment.

“Be okay, apartment.” I thought about what people usually said in movies. “The power of Christ compels you!”

I squirted the rest of the bottle all over the apartment. The carpet was damp. I slipped the smaller vial of holy water into my purse. It stayed there for the next three years just to be safe. That night, the lapsed Catholic slept with the light on. Glow in the dark silly bandz on each wrist do the job now as the sounds in the night are nothing more than an old apartment and my boyfriend’s nighttalking.

Yes. Of course.

I am sorry to report that the New York summer has since melted these into pink and brown marshmallows.

There aren’t yellow cabs in the Bronx the way there are in Manhattan. You see them now and then when someone is coming from Manhattan but for the most part it’s all dark towncars and other nondescript cars only recognized by the license in the windshield.

“Gypsy cabs,” Gabe calls them.

I like walking in the Bronx, Riverdale to be exact, but I take these cabs when it rains, when I have bought too many groceries. They follow me for a bit when I am just walking, hustling behind the guise of chivalry.

“It’s raining too hard.”

“Those look too heavy for you, let me help.”

Yesterday I got in one outside the grocery store because I had already been rained on once in Manhattan and there’s nothing worse than being rained on while holding cupcakes. My skin looked cold and blue in the mirrors in produce and I could barely sign the credit card receipt so when the man motioned for me to get in the cab, I obeyed. He lifted my groceries from the cart and put them in the trunk while I climbed into the backseat. I began to tell him my address when he held up his hand.

“I know, miss,” he said in broken English. “I took you and your husband home on Saturday.”

He had. I didn’t correct him on your title. There are literally five cab drivers in Riverdale and they all know me by now. They assume the diamond ring forming a flower on my left hand is an engagement ring, a wedding ring, that I’m taken; in fact, I don’t correct anyone on this because I am taken, legalities be damned. They don’t know that my parents gave me this ring, that it used to be one of my mom’s wedding earrings and that our dog ate the other one when I was nine. He drives up the hill and we listen to the radio reports about Steinbrenner’s death. They mention his grandkids.

He pulls up outside our building and immediately gets out to open my door for me. The doorman comes outside in the rain and helps him carry my groceries inside the lobby. I run inside with the day’s Daily News over my head. I pay the driver and overtip like I always do. He smiles gratefully before running back into the rain. The doorman, a newer one, helps me get my groceries into the elevator.

“Do you need help?” He is exceedingly polite and doesn’t seem to notice the blue tinge to me.

“No, thank you, I’ll be okay.” The doors close between us.

I put everything away, take off all my clothes, and climb back into bed with the paper. I can see the Hudson River here from the 11th floor. Penthouse is trying to buy Playboy and the Knicks signed a bunch of guys who are not LeBron James. Soon you’ll be home with flowers and I’ll untie your tie. We’ll kiss and watch the sun set on the Bronx; I’ll remember why I’ve grown to like it so much.

finish each other’s

It’s our anniversary today. We didn’t have an exact date that we started dating because of false starts and certain people being unable to commit assholes (those people would be me and only me) so we decided a while ago to pick a date. July 13th is not only far from Christmas and the like and our birthdays but it’s also National French Fries Day; it’s also the day of the MLB All-Star Game this year and if you know us at all, it’s appropriate.

For once, I don’t really know what to say. Maybe it’s because I’ve said so much in the past about my relationship, maybe it’s this desire to keep something more private while also just very literally having nothing to say. If you’ve followed the progression of my blogging life for the past year and a half, you’ll know that once I let this wonderful man into my life for good, I have become better, more comfortable and certain that I am the person I should be today.  Nothing is ever easy all the time but it can be right. I’ve learned that life doesn’t allow you to be happy all the time but you can definitely be loved every minute. It’s all at once simpler and richer than I ever thought love could be.

Happy anniversary. Come home for these.

And these.

On comfort; and it’s ok that you get hair on your feet

I have a pimple on my cheek just below my eye. I’m lucky and get them rarely but when I do, I can’t help but feel hideous, as if something unnatural is growing from inside me. It was throbbing yesterday and I was paranoid that he was looking at it. He was. He leaned over and gently popped it for me. He went to wash his hands and came back to bed to kiss my face. I hid my face in his neck because it will never make sense to me how he can think I’m beautiful all the time.

He does and I still try to gussy myself up for him. Every time I fly here, I apply eyeliner expertly and put on perfume and the underwear that I wish I had defined abs for for no reason; I am wrinkled and wilted by the time I land and make it through baggage claim. And he’s happy, ecstatic even! I walk around the apartment in his boxers and a sports bra, with the most loving love handles and no makeup on and my bangs doing some sort of cowlick you don’t see on anyone but me and three-year-old boys, and he has the audacity to tell me I’m gorgeous.

I’ve farted in front of him, let him rub my unpedicured feet, allowed him to witness my eyebrows at their most Frida and he’s pleased as fucking pie. I didn’t really get it and in some ways, it just pissed me off; he’d appreciate and gawk when I’d look all sexpot but he really just likes when I look like shit, too. Once during an intimate moment, he looked down at me and held my face in his hands. He looked at me for a long time and I felt instantly uncomfortable.

“Why are you looking at me?”

“I just like looking at you like this.”

“I don’t have any makeup on or anything.” If he wasn’t holding my face, I would have turned my face.

“That’s how I like you best.” He ran his thumb over my cheek and lips. “You look beautiful with it on but it’s like I can really see you without all that stuff. It’s like I’m closer to you.”

I’m not into melting, I’m a terrible romantic and I fight it at every turn. Normally, I’d think, of course, we were having sex when he said that, typical, but it’s not that. He likes my belly, and I’ve puked on him before at, I can say wholeheartedly, the worst time ever. He likes when I stink. Nothing about me grosses him out. I used to be afraid that this would be the moment that romance died but if anything, we just feel closer. Life is really hard and seemingly a series of masks we put on for different people so if you find someone who likes who you are at the end of the day, you might just have something.

portrait of the boyfriend as a white man.

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