Laura Powell

Ironed my pajama top

Bought a blanket ladder with money I don’t have

Texted my friend that he reminded me of the protagonist of the movie I was watching

Immediately regretted texting him, since he immediately asked me what movie I was watching and I was forced to admit that it was a romance and imagined what he must think of me, now that he is quite flattered that I should compare him to a charming writer who has an affair with a chic French woman

I used to own this raincoat. I bought it at an Anthropologie in Phoenix, Arizona when I was 16 and had no business spending any money in that store. But I loved it. And continued to love it for 2 years, despite the red bleeding onto the clothes I wore underneath. I gave it up in between moves 12 and 13, after I had enough of the noisy swishing of the PVC. 

My mother’s second marriage was to a pasty amorphous lawyer wad named George. He laughed at jokes that weren’t funny and allegedly practiced martial arts, though that has never been confirmed. 

He was a “recovering” everything - alcoholic, drug addict, codependent, gambler, and as my mother said, “only by the grace of God” were we all blessed to have him in our lives. 

For our first family dinner, which happened two months after their wedding, four months after they had met, we went to my aunt’s house. My aunt is the most anxious person, and although a microwaved meatloaf would have impressed our new stepfather, she pulled out all the stops and cooked from dawn to dusk in her housecoat, while the rest of us counted the minutes until we could leave.

As she pulled the Coq au Vin out of the oven, she asked me what I thought of George. I mumbled something ambivalent and made a reference to spending most of his time at AA meetings. 

“You mean he doesn’t drink?” She asked.

“He can’t.”

We both looked at the chicken. 

“It’s fine,” I said. “It cooked down, there’s no alcohol in it anymore.”

“I’LL HAVE TO MAKE SOMETHING ELSE! I CAN’T KICK HIM OFF THE WAGON!”

“You won’t” I offered “Here, I’ll Google it”

“Don’t put that cancer machine so close to your face! Didn’t you get my email about cell phones and how they are ruining the health of America??!?”

“I think it’s fine, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him eat chicken marsala, it’s like the same thing”

“No! I won’t have it! This is the least hospitable thing to do.”

“He won’t notice, I swear. Just put it out, you’ve worked all day!”

Minutes of this back and forth until I she conceded and we swore secrecy to each other. It was laid out on a silver tray on their mahogany table like a magazine cover. 

We sat down for dinner, my uncle said grace and I slipped my hand out of my brother’s to drink more of the wine that George wasn’t. 

We passed plates and the adults started talking about Mitt Romney and how he has such a heart for God, how my aunt was still waiting for a response from the Justices of the Supreme Court regarding her letter about Obama’s birth certificate (or lack thereof). My brother and I timed our eye-rolls and kept our responses to 3 or 4 words to avoid having to defend our newfound collegiate openminded-ness.

Auntie had begun to relax and I had certainly forgot about the whole wine-based sauce, stuffing the third breadroll into my piehole. Things were going smoothly for a meal celebrating nuptials that no one believed would outlast a Kardashian marriage. But peace is always shortlived.

“Toni, this chicken is absolutely delicious! What is your secret?” my new nitwit stepfather proclaimed, while said chicken was still being pulverized in his mouth.

And my aunt cracked.

“GODFORGIVEMEITSBRANDYIMSOSORRYITWASAHUGEMISUNDERSTANDING - IDIDNTMEANTOINCLUDETHEALCOHOLIHADNOIDEAYOUWEREABOOZEHOUND.” She wailed, throwing her napkin behind her chair before leaving the table to “go pray”.

George, unable to connect the dots, just kept eating the chicken, looking up from his plate like a puppy whenever his name was mentioned. 

DAY 2

My friend Max and I met nine years ago at a cafeteria table on the campus of Villanova University. It was Candidate’s Day weekend, a two-day impress-fest in April meant to sell admitted students a specific type of liberal arts KoolAid. Our mothers, both drunk on said KoolAid, struck up conversation in the bathroom and decided to make us sit together while we ate bag lunches, asking and answering questions for us (”Laura is planning to study International Relations!”, “When are you graduating, Max?”,“Are you looking at any other schools?”). We may have managed feeble smiles but it would have been difficult as his face was buried beneath a long mop of hair and mine was frozen in contempt for my mother, who had made me wear a skirt.

When I saw him again months later at a mandatory Freshman social, I called to him from one side of a tennis court to the other, surprised by my own audacity. Near-stranger was the closest I had to friend in the sea of strangers I was now swimming. We were both more agreeable without our hovering mothers.

We forged a friendship slowly and then all at once, learning the names of friends from home, childhood pets and pretending like we knew each other so well (didn’t we?). We clung to each other through the first semester of college, trying to anchor ourselves in the vast uncertainty that comes with higher education. Days we spent in the field outside the church climbing tress (the field that has since been paved over for parking), nights we spent walking the train tracks of the regional rail that dissected our campus. We fancied ourselves characters in our own Wes Anderson adventure, and made plans to go on wild explorations, to shake the discontent out of our bones.

And we did go on many adventures. And there are many stories. Many phone calls from restaurant bathroom stalls and internships in new cities, mission trips gone awry and navigating the harder things that came up along the road of 4 years - disappointment, stagnation, loneliness, death, depression. But, mostly, when I reflect on our friendship, I remember the grayish color of the batter we used to make waffles in our school cafeteria. And how we were constantly being scolded for sneaking chocolate chips into said batter from the yogurt bar. And how the timer on the waffle maker was broken, so we had to lift the lid every minute or so to see if it had cooked, and the semi-cooked dough would rip the waffle in half and it took two or three forks to scrape it off the iron plate and when it was all done it looked like our breakfast had been mauled by medium-sized dog.  And all the while Stevie Wonder was be playing and we tapped our feet and pointed to each other to sing every other line.

You would think I could come up with a more original title. I can’t. 

A year ago, I dusted off my mother’s copy of The Artist’s Way and flipped to page 9. When we lived together (many moon cycles ago), it was her bible - stuffed between library books and journals she kept while she was divorcing my father, the spines of all of the above creased and angrily bent in toward each other. I’m not sure she ever read it in it’s entirety, but she referenced it as if she had, and called the author by her first name (Julia) whenever it came up in conversation ("She was married to Martin Scorsese, you know,”). I, like my mother, have never read the book cover-to-cover, but last June I read, and re-read, and read aloud the 8 pages Julia Cameron had penned about the Morning Pages. And then, as a child of Google, I read all of the things the internet could say about it, including this and this and every other personal testimonial about how writing three pages each morning could change anyone’s life. Because, I, like my mother, have legs that resemble logs and am a sucker for cure-alls, silver bullets, scams and get-rich-quick schemes. And so I believed with little more than the anecdotal proof of strangers that Morning Pages would lead me to lose weight, quit my job, love myself, FIND HAPPINESS. 

I started in June with entries that all began “I’m not sure why I’m doing this...” By July, I had found at least one purpose for these pages and all mornings began “I’m angry because...” followed by lists of transgressions and transgressors. These pages, the tallies of sins for which I had not forgiven, went on through the summer, until I had exhausted each imaginable offense I had suffered. I whined in ink, finally freeing the nine-year old inside of me by writing in each direction on the page. Into the autumn, days I skipped writing became evident in my emotional responses. “Did you do your pages today?” became a favorite quip of my husband when I finished the day upset. But I resented them still. I had not lost weight, nor quit my job. I had no more love for myself and I had certainly not been smacked in the face by a discovery of happiness.

I opened my fourth notebook on the first day of this year wondering if I would continue the pages forever. What purpose would it serve? No one will see these. They are worth nothing. I am not a better writer, I’m not a better person. I’m just a girl obsessed with self-assurance; with documenting my feelings, all of which changed so rapidly and without pattern. I saw in these pages, how flawed I was - how I couldn’t seem to form careful opinions about anything. How easily I jumped to judgement, to picking sides then quickly turning my coat again and again and again. I started listing the ways I was frustrated with myself, until, just as before, I couldn’t catalog anymore. I breathed easier.

When what little of spring came and went, my pages ended with reminders to my unsteady self that it will be okay. I wrote different iterations for days, cramming the characters into lines that should have gone onto the next pages: “ I will be okay. This will be okay. He will be okay. We will be okay.” And I did survive. I managed to let all of the ominous storms pass over me: dreaded meetings, tough conversations, tense family gatherings, weighty expectations I had for myself, for others. All of this was left unfolded and unpacked for me when I wrote - daily tickets out of the prison of my head.  

And now, it’s been a year and the pages have become something different. They are no longer enough. The same something that drove me into the boxes in my basement a year ago, to find Julia’s instructions, now urges me to keep writing each day. And so, here I am, writing the things I can still give life to in the closet of my memory. And here’s to hoping it will quiet the noise in my head.