This was going to be my Valentine’s Day post, but I was delayed. I’m going to try to say this without sentimentality, which is difficult for me to do.
In April, Chris and I will have been dating four years. The way we got together is not a pretty story. I was dating someone else at the time, and we were all great friends. Chris and I were buddies for a few years before, and it was a rocky friendship because he insanely irritated me. Not because he was an annoying person, but because he was unfailingly logical and happy. You know those people. You want to punch those people. I didn’t want to punch Chris, so for years, we engaged in these conversational battles that ended with me leaving the room and telling everyone in earshot that I coud not stand that goddamn Chris Fahey.
But Chris was, and is, a rock star, an incredibly dynamic, sexy and energetic performer, so even while I was surfacely hating him for besting me in some philosophical argument, I was secretly in love with his stage presence. Not the person, mind you – but the lanky musician who looked me straight in the eye when he sang his love songs. This didn’t mean anything – he looked at everyone in the front row, and I was always in the front row.
One night, after a show, after two and a half years of knowing him and wanting to throttle him every time I talked to him, I gave him a punch on the shoulder and then went to shake his hand, a way of saying “good show.” And he held my hand one second too long. My boyfriend and our friends were waiting behind me, but I couldn’t let go of his stupid, skinny hand. And it was over, really. The next week, my roommates and I threw a party at my house. My boyfriend was out of town. I kept careful watch on Chris the whole night, feeling guilty and intrigued. Somehow, we ended up in my bed. Nothing even remotely sexual happened, but we talked the entire night with our backs to each other. It was gentle; we didn’t fight this time, but instead we learned about each other. I learned he loved animals, and knew a million facts about any animal you could name. I learned he was still brutally logical, but he was also sweet. I drove him home that morning, and we idled in the parking lot of his apartment building. He got out of the car without saying anything.
From there, everything escalated, which caused much regrettable pain for my boyfriend at the time. We had amazingly surreal moments on the hill by the high school, watching white-tailed deer graze in a nearby forest. Our first kiss was on a freezing day in April on flat rocks on the shore of Lake Superior. It felt unreal to us, and finite to me, though Chris says he knew we would end up together. I thought I was having a life-crisis – my boyfriend and I had been having problems for months before. I wanted to leave, though I didn’t know it. Our affair was found out, and resulted in an ugly year, in which my tight-knit group of friends split open. Nothing was the same after that, and Chris and I held on tightly. I thought it wouldn’t last because couples whose relationships begin in a crisis notoriously don’t last, and I kept denying that our relationship was anything but short-lived.
One night, after a horrible argument with my now ex-boyfriend with whom I was still living, I went to Chris’s apartment and drank half a bottle of raspberry rum. It was a stupid thing to do, and I felt disgusting. I threw up several times, all with Chris knocking lightly on the door, asking if I was okay. When I came out of the bathroom, he had a glass of water and a washcloth for me. I hugged him and something clicked in place, some electric heart-thing that sung on a frequency beyond the rum. And so we survived.
We lasted through all the mornings I knocked on Chris’s door at 5 AM, crying and panicking. He’d undress me and roll back the covers and sing a little in my ear to calm me, something he still does. We lasted through three moves, one graduation, one college failing, mono, bronchitis, overseas trips, friends who were not friends at all, family tragedies. He has seen me through long, long nights in which I didn’t think living was a good idea anymore. We have held each through so many impossible moments, and understood each other to the marrow about things no one else seems to understand. We still argue, a lot. We debate about everything, from space to Ayn Rand to how to boil spaghetti. He still irritates me, and I still leave rooms, angry and annoyed, but passionate.
I’ve never been with anyone who made me feel so many crazy, manic emotions, and I have never been with anyone I wanted to protect so fiercely. We have these moments, between our jokes and our debates and our long, cozy naps and our obsessive adoration of our cat and our individual crises – these moments, where we stand in the middle of the room and hold onto each other. It’s the way we’ve held on all these years – a firm grip that implies safety and understanding and a deep, dimension-bending, survivial type of love. I don’t believe in the traditional notion of soulmates, but if my soul had to pick a mate, it would be him, a million times over. Okay?
I look at these pictures from when we first started dating and I remember exactly I felt. It was a mixture of extreme lust, giddiness, sheer terror, comfort and a bone-thin tenderness:
First picture together, May 2002
First summer we were dating; Jan Miller’s basement
Summer, 2002
So much for the sentimentality.
School pisses me off most of the time. I’ve always said that I love learning, but I hate school and what I mean is that I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like being bored in a classroom, talked at endlessly, being handed papers upon papers with rules and parameters and consequences. I don’t like the mindlessness of group projects and pop quizzes and wordy textbooks. I want to sit in the middle and listen, and do what I want with the knowledge. I don’t want to put it in a bullshit paper or Power Point presentation; I want to collect it and quantify using my own methods. It’s a bunch of trivia anyway, yes? Someone says, “Hey, what was Kennedy thinking during that Cuban Missile Crisis, anyway?” And I’ll have an answer for you, but does it mean anything? No, it means I read a couple books and watched a movie and got some sub-par grade on a paper about it. But, see, I can’t think like this to finish my degree. There’s an arrogance here, a disrespect for authority, a spoiled snot-nosed fuck-off attitude about all of it.
And so here’s what I do like about school: I get this feeling sometimes in class when what’s being said is interesting. When I suddenly learn something I didn’t even know was there to be learned. I watched a video in my science class about climate change and there was this little island where a flood had wiped out the vegetation. The animals on the island would’ve been doomed, but a group of biologists flew down and paddled boats and pulled the animals from the trees, even the tarantulas. The video showed the scientists unwinding snakes from branches and stuffing spiders in small plastic cups, and how fucking amazing is that?
And there was a Logic class I took a while back for a math credit, and I thought I’d fail it because – math? Anything relating to math? But I fell in love with the subject. (I also fell in love with the professor, which may have had something to do with my passion for the subject, but still.) I spent hours on homework, and I wrote down things he said in the margins during lectures, things that sounded like poetry. I told him this once, how I thought there was poetry in Logic, and he asked me to send him my margin notes. This could happen anywhere; I could’ve seen that movie on the Discovery channel or I could’ve met the professor in another setting and heard him speak so eloquently about proofs.
But I think there’s more room for magic in school than anywhere else. I spend my nights fighting with the origins of the universe, being frightened of my own heart (literally; how does it pump? how does it just keep going and going?), but going to school, as difficult as the going is and the staying is and the anxiety attacks I have in between classes and the worry and the procrastination and the bad grades and the good grades – going to school is making peace with the why, I think. It’s a tough love, but it’s there, and I need to remember this.
Now that I have a new camera, so much more of my life happens on Flickr
There are secret doors labeled like this around campus. I prefer the oceans for means of escape, but New Zealand works, too.
I think this year should rewind and start over. Surprisingly enough, I’m not really a negative person and I don’t believe in “bad days” or “bad years,” but Jesus, how many disasters and crises and stupid things can get compacted into two months? Because, really. There’s a personal record being set here. I don’t know whether to cry hysterically or take off all my clothes, run through the hallway and bash things with a golf club. It’s an endearing kind of lunacy, really.
Listen: I know, life is what you make of it and it’s all how you view the world and yes, I’ve been to therapy. I know how this works, but I’d like an easing up here. I’d like to push life into a chair and wag my finger in its face and yell, “Hold still. Hold the fuck still for a second.” You know? Winterkill, indeed.
I have a terrible sense of direction. I hate to drive. I haven’t been on a highway in three years, so I take back roads, long, windy, out-of-the-way side streets that are more dangerous than highways, but that’s just a technicality. People have to rescue me all the time from wrong turns and bad night vision. I’ve been lost all over the damn country, squealed my tires into anonymous neon gas stations, ears ringing from the honks of the angry cars stuck behind me. I’ve become hysterical in my car, blasting air conditioning and Bruce Springsteen to drown the needly witchy voice in my head that shrieks, yes, you are lost again, you stupid girl, you’ve done it again.
One time, I was lost in Wahpeton, North Dakota on the way to my then-boyfriend’s lake cabin in Detroit Lakes. I thought I was close, but when I consulted the map behind the general store counter, I realized I was devastatingly, despairingly incorrect. I stood in line at the pay phone, quietly crying into my hands, when a red-haired Irish woman touched my shoulder and asked if I needed help. I couldn’t talk, so I pushed past her and waited in the parking lot until she was gone.
Virginia. 1999. I’m on the highway, driving to Charlottesville at 2 in the morning when I take a wrong exit and end up on the darkest, scariest, dustiest road in the entire universe, a road so dark I thought I had driven directly off the planet. I find an open gas station 15 miles down the road and the old woman who’s running the place puts her hand out towards me when I walk in the door, a ghostly, friendly gesture, and I dismantle. I’m lost, can you please help?
All my life, I’ve needed this help. One reason I’m so desperately interested in people, all people, is that I need those rocks. I need all the information I can extract so I can still trust that one day, when I’m driving in circles in a corn field in North Dakota, there will be a person on the road with their arm extended, palm face-up.
I have this vision lately of being a lonely motorist, driving across a frozen lake, the ice empty for miles. There’s a blue fishhouse in the center, but when I reach it, no one’s there. I knock on it, pound it, kick in the door, kick in the ice, get in my car and slam into it, but still, no one comes out. After a few minutes, I sit down, my ass freezing, my toes aching from the kick, and I wait. And you know? Despite the cold, despite the empty icehouse, despite the fact that I’m the only person on the lake for light-years, I decide to keep waiting. Forever, maybe. To the end of the galaxy and Wahepton and all points in between. If you sit still, you can’t get lost.
A year ago, I was trying to tell you the same thing.
Sometimes it feels like I only give myself two choices: a) a life of chaos, where exciting, underground adventures happen that either create colorful daydream fodder or sickening internal stress; or b) a life of calmness, serenity, deep yogic breaths, cold pensive walks around the lake, numbered routines and complete and utter boredom. Where’s the middle? I’ve never found it.
I mean, we have a weekend once where I let gay men draw intricate glitter pictures on my shoulders, face and small of my back before we all piled in a car, drove north two hours and I danced on a black box suspended in the air on a gold chain until 6 AM, and then when I got tired, I slept on a blanket in the back of the DJ’s truck, completely sober, sprawled next to a purple-haired girl I just met who had a degree in astronomy and who explained the mathematical controversies behind Jupiter’s moons. I listened to her for three hours before my friends came out of the club, and it was only then I realized I didn’t have my shoes. I never found them again.
Another weekend: spending 30 minutes finding the perfect meatless meatloaf recipe and then carefully chopping green peppers and sweet onions, and kneading the mixture with my fingers, not stopping to lick the residue because there are raw eggs, and raw eggs cause uncomfortable diseases. And then, still in pajamas, with hair pulled back with a scrunchie from 1992, I cube red potatoes, lower them into boiling water, and then I lean out the dining room window as if smoking, but no cigarettes, just a mug of lemonade and the cat through my elbow.
I know everyone says: you can have both these things. They can co-exist. But in my mind, there’s room for only one reality, and someday, I’ll have to choose. What would you choose?