I was in Hopkins that summer. I’d run away from Duluth for a few months to get my head together after a bruisy spring in which I managed to destroy my relationship and my theatre career in one punch. I was falling in love with Chris, but my old relationship (Erik) was still around, and I vacillated between the two for a while. I lived in the muggy basement of a house owned by a sweet new-agey woman I’d met through Erik. She was loyal to him. She didn’t like Chris coming over, so he crawled through the storm window. (I’ve talked about this before.) I was taking sedatives, but my freckles were out for the summer and I went places. Everything was OK, until it wasn’t.

Anyway, I was driving back from seeing Erik in Duluth. I was racing a dude in sunglasses from Florida when I reached over to grab my directions. My car went across three lanes of traffic - during rush hour! - and ended tilted in a ditch. I lived, somehow. Thirty minutes later, still shaky, a girl slammed into me under the 11th Street bridge. Then another girl slammed into her. When I opened my door, my knees were water and I fell. The highway did not cause these accidents, but combined with the heat and disorientation of the summer, a phobia developed: I drove on the highway once more, to move back, but I never drove on it again.

I learned backroads, or I didn’t go at all. Embarrassed, I made up excuses about my car, or my health, and I canceled plans because I didn’t want to ask my friends for one more ride, especially since I lived out in the suburbs (Richfield, then Saint Louis Park). I missed concerts, parties, weddings, work meetings, school events, dates and fantastic adventures. I trapped myself, for a while, though I never knew if the driving got me, or if I used it as a crutch. Either way, I did not drive on a highway. Not once, for six years.

So this Saturday it was raining and dark and late. I was tired and maybe a little weepy. I felt defeated and brave because of life’s latest fluctuations (self-caused, really), and so I took a turn and I was on the highway. I did not die. My car did not explode. My brain did not immediately morph into one of those plasma balls you see at the science museum. I just drove. I did it because I had to, and I did it out of a kind of love, or what I thought was the end of love. And then the next day, I did it again. And then again.

We know how I make decisions: they seem impulsive, but I’ve been quietly planning for months. Sometimes I don’t even know I’m planning. My bravery follows the same line. I am afraid, for years. I am afraid, for minutes. And then I’m not afraid at all, and I step into the road. Easy enough.

At the party in the penthouse suite, Coco and I are in the bathtub. No water. Guys drift in and out, staring at us like we’re caged, shouting to friends about the two chicks in the tub. There’s a TV next to the toilet playing some crime show. A tall blonde woman walks in, looks at us. Disapproves.

There’s an AA meeting at the table next to us at the Mexican restaurant. It’s 2 AM and they’re arguing loudly about who’s the most legitimate alcoholic. At the chain restaurant on Grand days later, a pastor across the room lectures his daughter about “how the universe works.” At brunch on the weekend we’re bookended by strange-looking people holding babies. We start to feel like actors are following us everywhere we go.

In the lobby we’re eating pizza by a gas fireplace. I’m wearing a blue dress and I’m not in the mood to be there. There’s a video on the wall that looks like a still picture but just turns out to be actors holding very still on film. Ken comes out of the elevator, bounces over to say goodbye to us. The party must be over. His friends tug on his coat. He’s been hard to wrangle all night. He shakes our hands, allows his friends to take him. On the way out, he shoves a cigarette in his mouth and leans over into the fire to light it.

He guides my back as we walk a series of staircases and hallways. It’s an apartment building that looks and smells like a hotel (sterile). I intuitively turn the wrong direction each time, but he manipulates me like a magician performing a coin trick. I’m suddenly turned around, and dizzy on the staircase. But this has always been my life: spatially disorienting. But I’ll go where you tell me, if you catch me in the time of year when I’m ready to be taken: in between seasons, half-asleep and sweet.

Photo by Coco

1. A flask of blackstrap rum spilling down my face and black dress in the fancy bathroom of an upscale restaurant as I wait for Coco to take the photo.

2. Singing obnoxiously in a whiskey bluster with Chris as Rick belts out Hey, Jude on stage. Abbey, seven months pregnant, feels her baby kick when her husband, the drummer, starts the na na na na nas into the mic.

3. Half-sleeping in the backseat of the car after lunch, the sun hot on my face, the guitar solo from Freebird blasting.

4. Ravenously eating string cheese as we - the office girls - walk back from the gas station, giggling about the weekend and swearing we need to get our lives together before it’s too late. But not really meaning it.

5. Running across the backyard with my dog in shoes that give me blisters, a warm rain running down my arms, feeling an achy type of joy unheard of sober.

My problem is that I’ve never been able to let people own me, even in this completely acceptable, necessary, everyday way. It is not a rebellion and it’s not all that interesting, but it’s a truth I thought would fade as I aged. I’ve been wrong: the older I get, the more I pull and resist, and I cause cold wars. Some friendships suffer; the ones that don’t are those people who have made peace with my solitary brattiness, but at a cost. I want to love you and comfort you and care for you, but only in emergencies. When it comes to daily friendships - coffee, shopping, movies, dinner - I drag my feet, make excuses. Cancel. Hope you understand.

Of course, it’s more than just this weird Almasy ownership issue - I’m awkward; I’m shy; I’ve taken that junior high gut-wrenching longing for you to like me, and buried it so deep that I turn silent and flighty when sober; into an oversharer when drunk who goes home and vows not to see anyone for two weeks, a vow I usually keep. After a four-drink night, I feel like I’ve given too much away or allowed people to believe they have a control or authority over me that they don’t. I want to call them up in the morning and say, you don’t know anything about me! You only know what I give to you! I have complete control over my own spin!

I want control over my own spin, is the issue. If I own my news cycle, then no one owns me. But this only applies to people I only half-know.

For the people I know-know - husband, best friend, parents - the righteousness I feel with strangers turns to guilt. Why do I always want to do what I want? Why don’t I defer? Why don’t I just do what I’m supposed to do, what people expect and desire? I compromise, a lot. I think those compromises keep me from falling off the edge of the world, and I’ve made peace with them. But I compromise less than most people.

There’s a way to romanticize this - free spirit! path less traveled? marching to my own drummer? But is there anything particularly romantic about letting people down?

I wanted to make a manifesto for myself today, but I couldn’t figure out the purpose in posting it publically. And what it would say? I’m my own person, and no one can claim me? Good for me, right. There were going to be some lines about treating every person I know with dignity, whether they’re in the room or not. Sometimes I feel like I sell out people for entertainment, or to be liked, but that’s an aside. But maybe not - if I don’t want to be owned, does that mean I don’t want to own anyone else, either?

I do. I collect pieces of people like jewels. I get a heat in my stomach like joy or sex when people confide in me; it makes me feel better, more connected, more in love with everyone. But I just want to collect.

Anyway, here’s a poem:

It’s Ours
Charles Bukowski

there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing

that
gentle pure
space

it’s worth

centuries of
existence

say

just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch

that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won’t
get it all

ever.

There’s homework, but first I need to drink this coffee (so good!) and look up what aristolochia means because I heard it on a West Wing episode.

I’m working on a senate campaign and the to-do list is endless, but there’s my old, dear friend drinking a beer on the stairs, taking a break from the poker table running in our dining room. His wife - my best friend! - is almost five months pregnant, and he’s a little drunk, but his giddiness is real.

I have to research for a class, and maybe I should be putting in extra hours at the office so I can fuel any back-end political hopes I might have, but Chris’s favorite hoodie is missing, and I need to excavate the basement to find it. In the basement there’s a drum kit and an organ we found by the dumpster, and I need to play both, just for a few minutes.

Now it’s not like this is ADD, and it’s not like this always makes me happy. I’m a little tortured by the lack of focus and the sensory overload, and it can make me crazy, and it can push me so far in my head that I don’t come out for weeks, but I’m learning to accept something.

I wanted to be president when I was young. Or an astronaut, or actress, or writer. The last two, maybe doable. The first two: I will never be president. There is a pine green house behind my garage I never noticed, and now I’m thinking about its contrast with the snow, and I am not an intentional flake and I’m not some dippy solipsist, but I’m stuck on this house, on its half-open window, on the rusty grill waiting at the back door. Forgotten for winter.

I am a woman who spoils animals, who worries for their care and takes the privilege of sustaining a life seriously, and tenderly. I am a woman who is comforted by the scars on her husband’s face and the smell of the firewood on the front porch. I taste too strongly; I can barely tolerate a hug with bare arms because my nerves are tripled, and constantly singing. I’m annoyed with everything that I don’t feel in my gut, and so I’m rarely annoyed. But this is the main show for me: everything else is done as an afterthought, an “if I must.” And, mostly, I must, and I do. But still…

A friend mused that she was disturbed because she couldn’t figure out her passion - she liked people and their stories and listening to interviews on NPR about people’s stories. What kind of passion is that? she wondered. What do you do with something like this? You chant. It is OK to be who you are; it is OK to be who you are not; it is OK to be nothing at all but a pair of eyes and a sheet of hymnal skin.