2011
There is a bobby pin on the ground outside of the front door of our apartment building. It’s sitting on the concrete steps and what’s notable about this bobby pin is it has been there for at least a month. At least! I remember seeing it in its earliest days of being there and smiling to myself, thinking it probably came out of my hair when I was putting on a winter hat on the way out the door. Now I check for it most times I come in the door. The very fact that I haven’t stopped to pick it up all these days, all these trips to and from the apartment, fills me with a little thrill. I smile to myself wondering if D has noticed it, if he’s also figured it was mine, if he laughs too that no one has picked it up, and also if he, too, is a little thrilled by his own refusal to bend down and grab it. Why has it not blown away, or been kicked away, or carried away by that stray cat that sometimes walks with another cat, side-by-side, tails intertwined, through our backyard?
I didn’t look today. Maybe it’s gone.
I also have this situation with the soap in our shower, wherein we had a tiny circle left of our last soap, and it was bright yellow, and the new soap is white, so I have been trying to make it so the yellow disc of soap will become one with the big, white soap, that it will meld in and stick in the middle, and that this big soap entity will look like an egg with a yolk. I’m sorry to say, though, that it isn’t working. Every time I’m in the shower I run it into the water and sort of pet it gently hoping they’ll melt a little and combine, but then as soon as I go to use the soap they come unglued and I have to start over.
But I do start over. And those are my goals for 2012: continue to see the bobby pin on the cement steps and laugh; one day realize my dream soap amalgam.
I feel like sitting with small, important things like this are all I did this year, day in and day out. I thought a lot about writing but did not write. I read a lot, but nothing I need to recount here besides sitting up in bed reading next to each other before bed is all we usually need. If I am having a particularly bad go of things (ie, I saw Drive that week and was thinking too much about Death), we read out loud. Or sang, in the middle of the night, what we remembered of 69 Love Songs. I continued to be terrible at music but we now have a record player that makes our house feel more like a home and feels meditative and right. During the same week that I thought to myself that I missed living alone and singing in my apartment, he told me he liked to hear me sing (I’m laughably bad). So I have tried to forget myself and do it anyway. We cooked. I even brought my lunch to work a few times (bringing my lunch to work is pretty much the primary aspiration of my life). We made cookies and smoothies and oatmeal and pesto and pizzas and thanksgiving dinner for our families and popcorn for our Christmas tree. We learned to not really cook together, because we are controlling know-it-all’s. We learned I’m terrible when I’m too hungry (“hangry”) and he’s terrible in the morning. I taped Jolie’s list of how to keep your apartment clean on our fridge for months and we really almost did it. We become decent, dish-doing people in spurts. And then things go to shit and we decided that’s okay. That is, I cried a little, facing the idea that yes, I’m not a Clean Person even though I’d been trying to keep up appearances every since we met. But this is us and how we live, and that’s okay. At some point this year we became a family. I stopped drinking coffee, which was a bit of a betrayal (I got him to come home with me the first time by telling him I had an espresso maker). I started leaving the wrappers for tea bags on the butcher block every day, without really noticing (so I’m told). I drank so little that now my face gets red with half of a beer. I bought a bike that was too big and sold it on Craigslist to a woman who wanted to pay me more than I was asking for. Then I got another one. I didn’t really go anywhere, besides Michigan with his family and Florida for Christmas. I only blogged 20 pages worth of posts this year. We started two different zines and never finished them. I started paying off my student loans again. I exercised my stock options. I lost 10 lbs. I started writing copy for work — holing up in a little room and going to the Good Place, at least there if hardly ever at home. We spent the night in a boatel. I made dinner for friends every Sunday night as a rule, and then decided I was being a little crazy. We found an apartment together and the old woman who lived there at the time refused to leave. “Two weeks,” she said. We put our stuff in storage and stayed at friends places, and then his dad’s, and the day before we were set to move in the broker said she had good news and bad news. There really was no good news. I walked over the Williamsburg Bridge, often with Cassie, often talking about anxiety and the vain ways I try to “earn” happiness, to Be Good as a type of insurance, instead of living. On my birthday there was a rainbow. Then I came home and we watched You’ve Got Mail and I cried, not because of the movie but because I hate my birthday. Not because I’m getting older but because everything is not perfect and I want it to be, even when I try to make it no big deal. And we’re all going to die. Coming to terms with this is probably most of what I did this year. Better to do it, to see it, to notice it, and let it be what it is and not be afraid to enjoy it. I hate the word “enjoy” so much, but my boyfriend uses it all the time. And this is what this year has been for me. I have had to learn to sit with it and trust it and take it in of all its bare earnestness, without distractions, and without laughing or rolling my eyes.
