The internet has since moved to flashier things, but my internet needs have stayed simple. I’m sure I’ll still write here once a year. I’m going to keep a public blog for professional reasons at myrealname.com. (You need to know my real name to go there. It’s OK if you don’t know it. I don’t have many interesting professional things to say.)

Anyway, I was setting up my other website & felt like checking in here. It reminds me of where I started & all that crap, though knowing where I started is far less useful than I thought it would be. I’m not sure I care I was a 16-year-old who wrote a bunch online once and that I’m now a 29-year-old who can barely spit out a one-liner for Twitter.

The technology has gotten cooler, but I haven’t. But as many times as I try to flee the internet, I can’t. So…

Weather of my childhood was plain and mild, with no real blips and the idea of living somewhere where CRAZY SHIT fell from the SKY thrilled me.

I’m going on my tenth winter in Minnesota, where it snows four months out of the year. I didn’t move here because of the snow; in fact, I don’t think Minnesota’s snow registered when I bought my plane ticket.

But here I am, land of snow. I just spent 25 minutes in the windy, sub-zero temperatures brushing off my car. I can never reach the roof, so my car is mohawked until the sun dries it up. I started my car, then ran back in the house, my boots soaked, my once-pink coat white and brown, and I wished for sun and heat. Sun watch!

I want to love winter like I used to. Of course I do. I loved the idea of snow, Christmas Eve, being pulled in a sled by my best friend’s father (now dead 17 years of pancreatic cancer), searching half-heartedly for gloves lost in a drift and drinking cheap vodka in a dorm room in Duluth.

(Those people I drank cheap vodka with — they’re married off and their kids run around now, which is how it goes and I don’t care about nostalgia like I used to.)

But ————- this Christmas morning, I made a list of my friends’ children. Just the names. We went from just each other, then we had babies, and these babies have names, and I listed the names and connected them with lines to their parents. Left blank spaces for the kids to come. One next to my name! (This isn’t an announcement. It’s a what-if.)

I’d been looking at photos of one of the kids, a daughter, who looked so much like her father, that I felt uncomfortable. A clumsy spacewoman, unobserved.

On my first day in Minnesota, my mom and I ate in the top floor of a downtown hotel. The restaurant was posh and rotated in a lazy circle. The snow was heavy because it was January and we were high above the equator. It was the Year 2000. Nothing exploded. I’d convinced myself we would will into being the meltdowns and explosions and apocalypse just by believing it would happen. I did not stockpile water or vitamins or whatever it is you stockpile in emergencies. I’d just bought a ticket to Minnesota and stepped on a plane and landed there. It was my 19th birthday, and my mom bought me a glass of white wine and we twirled in this crazy restaurant while the snow piled below us.

Imagine all those things to come! All the things I didn’t know about! Nothing special.

Snow watch! Breaking news! This is Zosia Blue reporting live. Willed into existence.

It had only been a few days since Chris had cut off contact for good. I remember the smells. The smells! The ammonia in my hair from the brown dye, the hospital smell of the ointment I had to put on my tattoos, the copper nervousness of my anxious German Shepherd who drove us both crazy with her pacing and her constant whimpering. She would circle the house at night, moaning and neither of us slept. In the mornings I sat at a table at Ginkgo and wrote letters on a yellow legal pad, and there were smells there, too – dusty ancient shop smells, the sweet cream of the Thai coffee, the buttery old croissant I ordered each day and ate exactly half of. I did not eat then and my bones were everywhere.

I remember the not eating: I drank coffee and I ate the stale croissant and then I would eat a piece of bread before bed. I had no interest in food, which I understood was a sign of depression, but I’d been depressed before and had never lost my appetite. It fascinated me, and the part of me that wasn’t destroyed examined this scientifically. I recorded my calories on a program on my computer. 500 in every day. Much more out because I walked miles with my dog, in circles around the neighborhood in the cold. It was fall and the air was cold and clean, like white sheets just slept in.

She was anxious, jumpy and prone to whining if she didn’t get a walk, so we walked through the leaves, past the houses with the Obama signs, past the elementary school with the loud kids, through the park that had stone tablets informing you of all the tree and flowers names in the garden and back to my house, which was empty and boxed up in anticipation of a move. My coat was blue and from the thrift store and the zipper was broken. My mouth smelled like old tears because I was crying a lot, and I smelled like my dad (flannel shirts and Listerine), who was visiting because he was worried about me. I don’t remember what I was doing during the day besides going to Ginkgo and walking my dog and crying. I was working, but I worked from home and my life had narrowed to a very dark tunnel of events

My bed was stuffed in a corner. I’d rearranged the room when he left, had moved furniture eight times my size out of sheer will. Everything was a mess; cleaning up seemed stupid when it wasn’t my home anymore. I don’t remember what I wore to bed. I don’t remember how I slept. But I did, sometimes. I slept a lot. Or I didn’t sleep at all…

At one point my dad made a burgundy beef stew – from scratch, no recipe – and it lingered on the stove all day. He was a wonderful cook, though he didn’t cook much. I came home from a meeting and sat at the dining room table, and he put the stew in front of me and I ate it all. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted and it swirled around in my mouth hot and salty and I swallowed every single bite. And the next day I looked for apartments.

What I thought I would remember from this would be my interactions with Chris, how insane they were – truly twisted and chaotic and permanently damaging to us. But I only remember the times when I was alone and gritty, not the times when I was panicked and hysterical. I remember the times when I was stone, steeling myself as if holding a coat closed against a cold wind. The nights when I walked the dog in circles, when I drank that coffee, when I wrote those letters, when I sat in the same coffee shop at closing, ordering soup I didn’t eat, applying for jobs in California. The baristas knew me by name, they were used to the bony brunette with the yellow paper half-weeping in the corner over her Thai coffee. I still go to that coffee shop, though I’ve long since moved away. My hair is long and naturally red again, and I’ve put on more weight than I lost before. My order is the same, but they don’t recognize me and I’m grateful.

Cathedral Hill in St. Paul is where F. Scott wrote his novels, and where he and Zelda smashed up shit like rich hoodlums. The buildings are antique, bronzed, and not much taller than the trees. There’s lot of trees. And there’s the cathedral which sits sideways, watching over the city like a benevolent monster. Depending on the luster of your soul, it inspires comfort or terror, and for us half-breeds, both.

I parked my car at the top of the hill, got out, still shaky from not eating for a week. It’s amazing that I survived on coffee, bread and broth for so long, but it’s all my stomach would take. You might be the same way, but my stomach’s an emotional barometer, and nothing was going in or coming out that week. I had 10 minutes before my appointment, so I walked around, dizzy to the point where I thought I might pass out on the street. There were enough people around to witness my fall, and this is Minnesota, people call ambulances for strangers. And maybe I wouldn’t be a stranger, for long. Maybe this would be my new digs: a place to write my novels, to recover. How beautiful the first snow would be on the cathedral; I’d walk there each day. I’d light a candle. I’d start smoking, and track the streets like a ropey beast. Romantic!

Romantic on paper. Not in real life. There is nothing romantic about a broken heart; there’s really, really not. It’s romantic after it’s done, and it’s romantic when it happens to other people, fictional other people, but in the end, it’s about as romantic as a broken toe, and just as fixable.

The property manager was what we called a Wayzata Housewife: rich blonde highlights, starched shirts, caked make-up, sparkly ears. She was on the phone and motioned for me to come over. The office was sparse, and decorated like the Moulin Rouge, which I tried to take as a good sign, ah, yes, HOME!, but instead I slumped in a chair. She had two senior portraits of her equally blonde daughter facing out. The daughter had a horsey-smile and what we would call a softball-player face, and I looked away.

I knew exactly what I looked like, but didn’t have the energy to apologize: dull auburn hair (dyed last week), chipped black nail polish, untied sneakers with no socks and jeans that were falling off my hips. My face, Halloween-colored. There might’ve been a time when I wanted to look like this, when I would’ve cultivated the look of a kidnapped child locked in a closet for seventeen years, but that morning I’d spent more minutes that I wanted to admit spackling my face in a desperate hopefulness.

We were on the street, walking into the sun, talking about the weather. She walked fast; I did not. I didn’t know everything slowed down, you know? And soon we were in an apartment, and it was quaint and small and pretty, and I nodded and made tiny bird noises about it, and then suddenly we were in the laundry room, which was cemented and spidery and had rows and rows of industrial machines, and my stomach took this moment to thump against whatever inner wall surrounds it: OH HELL NO, said my stomach, and I put my face into my coat to keep from gagging.

There was an idea, of course, that if I left our house, if I moved into my own place, some cute, sparse studio with the cats – where I would write! I’d write like Scott and wail like Zelda! – that I’d feel better. Just get out of that house, everyone said. That house is suffocating you! You can’t live there alone like the last pea in the can. And of course, because I am this person, this imaginative, deathly hopeful ingenue, I thought – well, if there’s a change of venue, if he sees Writer Me in my adorable apartment overlooking the church, well, maybe then he’ll…

The next apartment was fine. Then we got in a car and drove down the street and she asked in a distracted, bright voice, “Doing anything fun today?” And I blurted out why I was looking at apartments, which was not the correct answer to her question, and she, like any stranger who’s had a three-ton unsolicited confidence hoisted on her, mumbled something, and kept driving. And the next apartment was fine, too, next door to the cathedral, really beautiful, actually, but then she showed me the “fitness room” which was a treadmill stuffed in a basement corner, lit by a single bulb swaying on a chain, and I could not shake the idea of, this is where lonely people live, this where single people live, this is where ____ people live. And I thought of our home, my home, which was sticky with memory, every corner, every inch of wall, but there was the noun of it: home.

She knew I wasn’t going to take it. Didn’t even hand me a card. Driving down the hill, my ribs aching, I called my dad, who’s been visiting for the week. He was at my home, watching the football game. “Let’s get pie,” I said, and told him I’d be there in 10 minutes. I stopped on the side of the road to cry a little, because I do this lately, this crying thing and I wondered how Chris was doing, and where he was, and what he was thinking, and I remembered that Zelda died in a fire and Scott died of a heart attack, and thought, OK, maybe we’re better off, maybe this is all for the best. But we aren’t fiction, which has always been the problem.

It costs to light candles in the cathedral, anyway.

This house is Maggie’s – dramatic Maggie the Cat, in rivers of fabric, who switches accents every few sentences. Her hands fly around her face like she’s lifting a veil. She leans into you when you speak. She says she’s practicing her empathy. Her shirt drifts towards her navel, and her teenage daughter hands her a sweater.

The psychic is Della. When it’s my turn, I creep into the porch and Della takes my hands. Della has short red hair and the stretched white forehead of a woman who always remembers to wash her face before bed. I am not that woman. Is she going to know this? I’ve taken off my wedding ring, walked gracefully into the room like someone whose inner life resembles a temple. I want to throw her off.

I ask Della my question. I realize later it wasn’t the question I really wanted to ask, but maybe she knew that. (Psychic, right?) She says, so simple! We’ll fix you now! She kneels and puts her hands on my feet. I admit it: I feel something. There’s a sizzling in her fingers, and my entire body feels like a bruised funnybone. She tames me. She finishes with jazz hands. Flair! I am saved. Is this what religion feels like? She says I’ll feel a fullness in my stomach now that schism in my – soul? – is repaired. Well, OK. I go back. I eat cake and mint tea and I slowly burn my shoulders in the afternoon heat. Maggie the Cat talks about Buddhists, astrology, facials, fucking.

At home I read an article about an undiscovered Amazon tribe. Well, they’re discovered now. Of course I draw an analogy. Here is what I think I want: I want to be a lost tribe. I want to be left alone for a while, but only with the knowledge that I’ll eventually be found. It’s the finding I want. Oh, that finding. I chase it. To be sitting on the edge of some dingy river, singing songs in a language only I understand, and then to see the anthropologist’s face in the brush. We will fall in love, this anthropologist and I! What a great love it will be, me the undiscovered tribe and he who discovered. But I bet it’s exhausting being discovered all the time. And I bet the novelty wears off for the finder. Still…

I believed it, you know. I believed that all it took was for a woman with beautiful skin to put her electric hands on my feet.