sometimes i write stuff

Finished this on the 4 train to work on Friday morning. Oh. Right. That’s one thing I should say: I have a workplace I go to every day now.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Last spring, I got a full-time job as a translator and interpreter at a place I’d rather not say aloud, for confidentiality purposes. Suffice to say, it has kept me extremely busy and tired for the past...close to 18 months now. (Yikes!)

But not so busy that I haven’t found time to read. So here we go.

As a person dating a person of Indian descent, I have found myself not knowing a damn thing about the culture, and since it’s such a huge part of my sweetheart’s life, I figured it was only right to start reading more Indian authors to try to learn a thing or two.

I had listened to Akhil Sharma read a few of the stories in this collection on The Author’s Voice, the New Yorker podcast, and so I figured I’d give the guy a whirl and try out the full collection. I was definitely not disappointed.

On Friday night over a shared carton of Halo Top (Oatmeal Cookie, bien sur), I told my sweetheart that the subtitle for this book should be: MY ASS. A life of adventure and delight, MY ASS. Of course, given the dripping rainbow on the gray cover, I should have expected little more than bleakness and pain, but still. Damn. Every character in the tiny worlds Sharma creates in his stories are suffering some sort of internal ache, but there’s no...he doesn’t dramatize it, he doesn’t blow it up, he doesn’t make any character a martyr: it just is what it is. Their lives are pretty much emotionally empty (love is a joke, sex is that thing we do sometimes to ensure the survival of the family name, women are albatrosses meant to be gotten rid of like infections just as soon as they’re old enough to birth babies), and what fills the inner void are the endless, time-frittering pursuits of intellectual, socioeconomic, and/or religious greatness. Essentially, two things matter to the brown folks: religion, and climbing up as many rungs of the socioeconomic ladder as humanly possible, preferably by marriage to a suitable man (i.e., one that matches your intellectual and social station as closely as possible, if not exceeds it).

The language in this book is really beautiful, not because it’s overtly poetic, but because of how quiet and subtle it can be. Sometimes each paragraph felt like a piece of music: a steady rhythm that builds into an explosive crescendo, usually punctuated by a harsh, if insightful, truth bomb. It’s hard to explain, except to maybe say that the prose is both beautiful and raw at the same time. You can tell Sharma’s characters are angry, and bitter, and clinging to what little satisfactions (I hesitate to use the word “pleasures”) they can get out of life. For mothers, that principal satisfaction is usually negotiating the terms of their children’s marriages; for fathers, it’s not getting yelled at too terribly much over the course of middle age, and not being shamed by their kids too severely.

I told you. Bleak.

Still and all, though, the book has its funny moments. Just little snippets of biting humor, nothing too on the nose, just language tricks that render certain scenes and fragments really humorous. Just a little something to counteract all the shame and sadness in the book.

Last night I had to do a very adult thing: accompany my love to one of her endless work functions.

I wore a black slip dress and a pink fur coat and a long rope of tiny pearls. We were at a famous gay bar in the city, and there we met a nice girl going through a shitty breakup. She was very sweet but very conflicted. It’s been a week since her partner stomped on her heart. They still live together--have to, since they renewed the lease for another year just before splitting (not amicably). Such is the peril of living in the city: real estate doesn’t leave much room for love.

So after all was said and drunk, my love and I wandered off in search of tacos. At the restaurant, we held hands on the table, as we are wont to do when we’re alone and don’t care who sees. It is rare for us to have that luxury. We can only afford it in certain bars, in certain neighborhoods. It’s 2016 only in numbers sometimes.

During dinner, our server-- a not-unattractive guy with dark skin and a fairly nice figure-- was good to us. When my love was in the bathroom, he came back to speak to me. We had a nice laugh over our backgrounds (come to find out he was Dominican and Haitian; I’m sure I made a joke about how his parents managed to set aside their differences long enough to have children), and we talked about languages and whatnot. We spoke French, briefly. Then he went back to work, and I went back to my horchata.

And then, while I was waiting in line for the bathroom, he came over and started talking to me again. He asked me where I learned French; I told him, and he was impressed. It was all friendly and very benign. Not a trace of flirting. Not even a whisper!

As we were leaving the place, he shook my hand and slipped me a crumpled paper. As soon as it was in my hand, I knew what it was. His number.

Outside, after much deliberation, I showed it to my love, and she burst out laughing. “But we were holding hands across the table,” she said. “It was pretty obvious. I mean, is he blind?”

At this point, I did the thing I keep promising myself I’ll never do. I got all weird. I do this a lot, usually when I think too much (and, contrary to popular belief, sobriety levels have nothing to do with it.). 

“I’m sorry,” I said, somehow angling to make this my fault, though we both knew it wasn’t. “I hope you’re not mad. It’s not like I ask for this stuff to happen, people just--”

“Shut up,” she said, laughing a little, and then she kissed me, and just like that, wordlessly, the matter was settled.

Maybe he was blind. Maybe people just see what they want to see. Maybe he thought our conversation was flirty. Maybe he thought I liked him. And the thing is, I did. I thought he was okay...until he gave me the slip. Literally.

I tend to be extremely reluctant to write about sex, mostly because up until about a year ago, I had never had it. I’d never even kissed anyone, and then all of a sudden I had my first kiss on the 4th of July, surrounded by fireworks (yes, yes, I am a cliche, let’s move on), and then late last summer I started hooking up with people I had only known for an hour or two, sometimes in public places: office desks, movie theaters, one girl’s apartment with the windows wide open in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.

I only mention this because I had a long phone call with a good friend a few days ago, and as we caught up and discussed the current state of our lives, she told me she’s grown deeply emotionally attached to someone she cannot, under any circumstances, actually be with. It would wreak havoc on too many lives. And I asked her, “If he ever made a move, would you go for it?” And she said, “I don’t knowwww” in that trembling way people say it when they mean “I can’t think about the answer to that question right now.” She is learning how to reconcile want and love. They are two very different words, and they don’t always lead to one another.

I just think all this stuff is connected and important, and I am trying to write about important things now, and if that means taking a risk, so be it. Enough hiding. Enough acting like this relationship, or anything else I deal with in my life, doesn’t affect me. Enough acting like I always have the upper hand. I don’t. I want my experiences to matter. Maybe by sharing ourselves we can help each other. It’s worth a shot.

I think it’s frustrating that women don’t have a place to talk about sex in an honest way, without judgments, or accusations of attempting to titillate with their words. I think it’s disturbing that only the sex lives of women are dissected with the kind of precision I would hope we’d reserve for, like, NASA. A man’s dick activities are never up for discussion. And I want to talk about the things people go through when they feel adrift, when they feel like the absolute worst case scenario is messing up so bad the guy (or girl) they’re with ends up leaving them.

I was in a relationship where it felt like I was supposed to do a lot of things. In particular: I was supposed to lie down and take it whenever he was feeling up to it. And that was more often than I would have cared for. I did not feel like I had a right to say no. I did not feel like I was being a good girlfriend if I wasn’t sacrificing my feelings for his. So I got good at pretending. But pretending is bad for you. It’s especially bad for your health. Women can pretend, but only up to a point. And pretending to enjoy something that actually hurts is a terrible thing. It can break you. 

Sometimes I think I’m being dramatic (as a writer, I am prone to fits of feels that border on the operatic in their scale). I mean, maybe he would have stopped if I had asked. But he never made me feel like I could. Part of me feels like I should never ever think about it ever never ever ever. Maybe it will go away if I don’t think about it. Maybe I will not be convicted of self-neglect if I do not bear witness to the pain.

Sometimes people wear pain like a badge of honor. Like it’s something they earned. But unless this pain takes place between two consenting adults, there is nothing that can justify another human being inflicting pain on you. Do you hear me? NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. EVER.

I was in a relationship that, towards the end, felt more like a series of transactions. It was never about what I could do to make him happy; it was about what I could do to make myself safe. How to be as safe as possible in such unsafe circumstances.

Last week I was skyping with one of my good writer friends who is a journalist for a big newspaper in Argentina, and she told me that she interviewed the leader of the biggest feminist movement in the capital. While they talked, the woman admitted to having had sex she didn’t want in the past six months. She felt like she had to do it. She felt like she didn’t have a choice.

You always have a choice. Always. Sometimes it is hidden behind the fog of devotion, or denial, or desperation, but it is always there. We are all learning. We are all growing. There’s no curve. Just you and your heart and how you choose to shape it. Saying no is not easy; it is easier to let him interpret your silence as a yes. But a lack of no is not the same thing as a yes. 

If you want to get laid, there is nothing wrong with you. If you don’t want to get laid, there is nothing wrong with you. Your decisions are your own. Your heart is not a threshold. Intimacy isn’t about territory, inches lost or claimed. Making love isn’t always about touching. Remember this.

Maybe the hardest part for me is learning that good relationships involve questions. Great relationships involve questions and answers. But now I know that the only correct answer to any question is an enthusiastic “Yes, please.” Yes is the only yes.

One Saturday night I said, You act like there’s this threshold, like eventually you’re going to stretch me too thin and I’ll snap and I’ll leave you and I just...

Outside, her neighborhood was having a festival, a big Indian gathering, everyone in rich saris like treasure chest jewels, like royal crowns, like kingdom come. Dancing in the intersection. Big music, loud, a middle finger to the people who look at them with disdain on the subway. I wondered if they felt the defiance vibrating in their shoes, thrumming in their veins. I loved the way it sounded. Inside, we were huddled under blankets, keeping warm. Thawing.

She bent her head down and tried to hide her face in the crook of my shoulder, and I didn’t want to let her. I didn’t want her to get away with it this time. Sometimes, you have to take a stand. Maybe love is a kind of defiance. Relentlessness.

So I asked her to look at me. Please. And she did. When she finally turned her eyes up at me they were so heavy, carrying something sad and happy and sad at the same time.

The night she said loved me, I had a knife in my hand. I was cutting bread. She looked up, lashes like a curtain across her eyes, dark and light, and she said it gently, like a secret, like an unknowable thing. The rest of the night she could hardly look at me. She kept her head bent and cried, maybe from the strain of the fear, or from the wave of relief finally crashing the shore, the release of telling me something she had felt for so long but had thought forbidden to say. She told me she’s never seen her parents kiss. I told her I’ve seen mine kiss too many times. I should have said my father was a wolf once, that his smile can still leave the walls of a woman’s heart ragged, claw mark scars. I wonder which one of us has it worse.

You make choices. You decide, over and over again, to let the tide guide you back to this person, this house of bone, this heart right here. This one. This one only. You make choices. A threshold gives when you stop making that choice. How terrified you must be, to stop choosing. To stop being relentless.

During Pride, when we were learning each other all over again, I was sick as a dog. Fever, chills, cough. I met her in Manhattan and as we walked through the rain she said I missed you. I told her I missed you too. She opened the door. She picked me. That night I sat up in her bed and she made me tea and when I got the shakes she didn’t turn away or ask me to go. Maybe that was when I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

So this week, somebody that I used to date sent me all my stuff back without my knowledge. I came home from Long Island a few days ago, and there was the box, taped in weird places, filled with my stuff. Stuff that I left, over a period of six months, in his bedroom. Clothes, makeup, a bunch of books. I made him a mix CD and he sent that back, too.

I probably shouldn’t be writing about this. Writing about something invariably colors the thing with life and importance, lets others know that you find this thing to be important, when in fact it is not, because I am now beginning to leave stuff at someone else’s house, in someone else’s heart. I am busy swimming in someone else’s blood stream, making someone else’s skin hum with the pulse of me. And yet.

And the thing is, I’m the one who left in the first place! Who decided to end things when the answer to the question “what’s the worst case scenario?” went from “leaving” to “staying.” I knew I had to go. I knew I had to save myself before I could begin to save anybody else. And yet.

He wrote me a letter, months ago, right after we broke up. He told me he was happiest falling asleep beside me. That night I dreamed of anchors, of getting lost at sea and never surfacing. My face in the papers. My heart underwater. And yet.

He told me he started writing songs again, that the music wanted him back in her life as soon as he stopped drinking. Maybe you have to let something go to get something back. Eye for an eye. Heart for heart.