#todaystuesday

It is not until we’ve reached the very end that we say, “I just want you to be happy. That’s all I want. I want you to be happy.” After all of the trying, you are left with nothing more than the white flag of happy. It is the purest feeling there is. 

I read somewhere once that the word “happy” comes from the root “hap,” as in “happened.” In its original iteration, to say you were “happy” meant you felt all right with what happened. 

This weekend I said it to someone. I said, “I just want you to be happy. It’s all I want.” I could see we were at the end. After all of the back-and-forth, the longing, the love-making and the talking, after the tenderness, after the frustration, after the hopes didn’t materialize and after the talk of the hopes lost its glitter in light of the fact that the hopes did not materialize, after the flame flared and died down, after the confusion and the disconnect and the confusion and the disconnect and the confusion and the disconnect became our normal, after it all, I was left with nothing more than that purest of desires: that he be happy. It’s all I want now, for him to be happy with what is.

Though as in all relationships, I am also projecting here. Because at the end of it all, it is my own happiness I wish for, too. I too want to feel good with what is.

A few days ago I met an ex-boyfriend of mine for dinner. On the way to the restaurant, I passed a couple on the street. They were young and maybe drunk. He was holding onto her just above the elbow and she was trying to pull her arm away, her body leaning too much on one leg. And so he leaned closer to her, to keep hold of her. And as he leaned closer, she pulled back further until she ripped her arm out of his grip, and then she shouted, “You’re a piece of shit! You’re a fucking piece of shit!” She turned her back to him and walked a couple steps before she turned to look over her shoulder to see what his face was doing. He looked too drunk to absorb it all, and like he was trying to think of what it was he was supposed to feel or do: Should he be angry? Relieved? Should he go after her? Not go after her? The woman walked past me and then I walked past the man. I felt conflicted about who to root for: the woman who might’ve finally released herself from a veritable piece of shit, or the man who was visibly stunned, watching the woman walk away like it was all part of a big show. 

A few minutes later, I arrived to the restaurant where I waited for my ex-boyfriend. I wondered what he would look like, and I was nervous about how I would look to him—older, of course, probably fatter. When he arrived I thought he looked better than I remembered him looking. In fact, each time I’ve seen him over the years, which is not much, I’ve thought that he looks better. It has something to do with seeing him less as my ex-boyfriend, maybe, and more objectively as a man: the salt-and-pepper hair, the intense blue eyes, the Roman nose.

During the evening we revisited what has always been our favorite conversation: the one about us. It has been like this from the beginning, the replay of our origin story—the one about me living in Morocco on a Fulbright, alone in a little house in a seaside town, and him traveling through Morocco after he’d worked on a film, and our intense thing we had when he came through, how we traveled together a bit, and then how heartbroken he felt after he left me, thinking of me all night on a bus in Spain. Later our origin story got coopted by the months that followed, where the talk of our origin story became our new story, how we longed for it. Remember when? we’d start our two-page text messages and our long emails. We wanted it back so bad, he returned to Morocco. And then he left again, and then I eventually moved back to the States, at which time it was the seductiveness of our origin story that, mmm yes, kept us alive for awhile—how good it felt to talk about those days until the story of us lived not in our bones but instead became an idea that lived in our heads.

And then I had to go and screw things up. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t balance the old Sarah with the new one who was a walking nerve ending in New York City, feelingfeelingfeelingfeeling. I burst into tears the first time I went to the grocery store, when I saw the bagged lettuce—Our society is so afraid of what is natural. I got lost underground; I called my boyfriend from a payphone on the subway platform. I kept yelling into the phone, Where am I? Where am I? 

How could he know? He couldn’t hear me on the other end—existentially, I mean. He was out of reach, beyond the room of terror and loss that I’d shut myself in. He was busy doing double-time, carrying our story in his head as he tried to bring me into his world, which only emphasized the dark contours of mine, how impossible it was for me to fit. His world had houseplants and books and albums and it smelled good. I could see him in it, making music as his cat lay on a golden, sunlit floor. Why couldn’t I just let go of the confusion of my world, especially when it felt so terrible? Why couldn’t I just be the woman from before, the one who was writing a book in Tangier so he could play the man whose work took him to different parts of the world? Why couldn’t I give that to him?

Our relationship did not end happy.

After dinner the other night, he said, “You were attachment avoidant.” He was reminding me what it was like when we were together, the “you” statements we both tossed around to globalize experience. It doesn’t matter whether he was right or wrong, what matters is that he said it despite being uninformed, in part because he had refused to be informed or because he lacked the capacity to be informed, because he held on to our origin story. He said that when he thought of our relationship now, he preferred to remember our laughter. Of course, I thought. Of course you would prefer the laughter. We laughed a lot when you first came to Morocco. 

Sometimes what we face in a relationship is this basic disconnect, the one between what we say is happening versus what is actually happening. For example: I’ve made real changes in my life so that we can be together, when no changes have actually been made. 

If being happy means accepting what is, then it also means letting go of the stories that keep us from seeing what is. It means stopping the intellectualization of stories, the rightness or wrongness of them, even the impact of them. It means feeling. We’ll do anything to keep us from feeling. We’ll cling to the story of what could be, to the story of what was, to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. It doesn’t matter how true or untrue the stories are. What matters is our grip on them, and the unhappiness our grip causes.

I was too scared to have kids. I was afraid I wouldn’t be a good mother. I was afraid I’d be too broke. I’d lose my patience. I would say all of the wrong things. My family wouldn’t be nearby to help me, either, and I wasn’t sure they’d want to help me even if they were. I wouldn’t be able to pursue my career if I had kids. If I had kids, I’d have to raise them alone. I didn’t want to be alone. 

Now I am older. Last year—was it last year already?—I blurted to a man: “But I want kids now and I can’t have them with you.” I said it that way—just like that. There was a long pause after, until he said calmly, “I didn’t know you felt that way.” And then I told him that I didn’t know I felt that way either. I didn’t know what I wanted. No, of course I didn’t want kids; I’ve never wanted kids. What was I thinking? No, what I wanted was our relationship to be different, his and mine. I wanted it to be the kind of relationship where having kids together was a possibility. It wasn’t.

I am 42 now. No one is telling me that I have to have kids. No one is telling me that I have to be married, or even partnered. No one is telling me that I have to have a 401K or a 9-to-5 job or a house or a car. I have never objectively wanted any of these things. In fact, I have actively rejected these things. But in the last couple years I will admit that I have become confused. 

This weekend I visited an old friend who has all of these things. She has a husband and children and cars and a beautiful house and she lives in a quaint seaside town and she is not broke and she is not alone. She was once like me: she struggled in New York, had bad luck with real estate, tried to be an artist, lived on bartending gigs. After about a dozen years, she realized that her life in New York was insufferable and so she got to work on changing it: she sought a partner, she got a full-time job, she moved, she married, she had kids.

The moral of this story is not that I need to be like my friend. It’s not that. It’s that she changed her path, maybe. Or that she recognized that she wanted it to change and so she changed it. 

After my weekend away, I came home to an ongoing fight I have been having with my landlady, who realized a little less than a year ago that she doesn’t want me living in her apartment anymore. I have lived here in peace for 11 years, never once late on the rent, but because I am a rent-stabilized tenant with below-market rent in a neighborhood that has exploded in popularity, my life isn’t so peaceful anymore. She has already sued me for eviction once, unsuccessfully. Last week she had one of her old cronies call to verbally abuse me and then threaten to evict me. He said, “Who do you think you are? We’re going to take you to court and make you spend every last dime you have. You’ll be on the street!” This was all over an electrical outage in the ceiling light in my living room. No one will ever evict me because a ceiling light went out in my living room, especially not one that I’ve since paid to have repaired—but still, this is my life. This is my life in New York. And the thing is, I am not so far from living on the street anyway, security-wise, money-wise.

Here is where I add that the rejections keep coming—two fellowships and a residency. No, no, and no. Though I was given a nice writing award recently, the money wasn’t to live on. I am still teaching emotionally disturbed children as a sometime Poetry Lady in the New York City public schools. I still commit my life to long hours of writing a book that may never be published. You have to be honest with yourself about these things. You are 42. You are just as alone as you always feared you’d be, stuck with a baby you’re bad at mothering. You lost confidence, you worried you’d hurt people you were writing about, you worried you weren’t good enough anyway. You got through each day to pay the rent, but now not even that is enough. 

I had a relationship once that lasted two years but somehow never felt like a relationship at all. I wonder if he feels the same way. I don’t remember ever feeling settled with him, even though we lived together for a short time. We were either fighting or I was trying to break up with him or we were trying to rebuild things or I was away for weeks at a time, once for as long as three and a half months. 

When I think of him now, I think of his hands—veiny, strong old-soul hands. I think of his eyes, too, and I think of his shoulders, how they turned inward slightly. I think of his alertness, how he seemed to always be scanning the perimeter, anticipating something terrible to come to pass. He was skittish. He watched your words carefully and if you said something he didn’t like, he’d hold them against you later, sometimes weeks or months later, long after you’d forgotten the context or the meaning of what you’d said. Of course when I write “you” here, I mean “me.” 

He had a childlike thing that brought out the mother in me, which I both loathed and I suppose liked in some ways. He was unable to sit still. He highlighted passages from the first chapters of books and then he gave up on the book to move on to another book related somehow to the first, or to a movie about the book, and then on to a gallery show or an art exhibition that was related by era or place or even abstractly somehow. 

This might seem like pseudo-intellectualism, and it did to me sometimes, but it wasn’t that; it was more that his curiosity drove him in splintered directions, and his confidence waned as texts thickened. But along the way, on his voracious searches, he came upon the most fascinating quotes and facts and passages and ephemera. He’d come home with stories, long narratives of these connections, about which he would hold court for hours at a time. He never wrote a personal card to me, but sometimes he wrote his most beloved findings in a tiny script inside a card that he would mail to me, for the formality, for the surprise, for me to see the gem inside the discovery as he did.

Today I taught poetry to 6th graders in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of Caribbeans and Orthodox Jews, Yemenis and Central Americans. We read Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s “El Hambre” (“Hunger”) from his collection, The Great Zoo. The poem starts: 

Esta es el hambre. Un animal / todo colmillo y ojo. / Nadie lo engaña ni distrae.

This is hunger. An animal / all fangs and eyes. / It cannot be distracted or deceived.

“Today we are going to write metaphors comparing a feeling to an animal of your own creation,” I said after we’d read “El Hambre” in Spanish, followed by its English translation. Like me, many of my students do not speak Spanish, but I wanted to hear the poem’s original version read aloud, even if it to hear it as music in our English-speaking minds.

Then we talked about why it is that Guillén had imagined hunger to be an animal made of only fangs and eyes. The fang part was easy: to eat everything with. But in all five of today’s classes, students shrugged to the question of the eyes. Then I asked if anyone’s been to an all-you-can-eat buffet when they felt like they were starving. Hands darted up. 

“OK, what happens? What happens to your eyes?”

“Oh yeah!” a girl called out. “My eyes bug out. I’m not kidding!” 

Then we made a list of feelings, both physical and emotional: loneliness, boredom, thirst, love, hate, hope ...

One girl on loneliness: Loneliness has a big body but a small heart. It spends its time thinking about what it’s lost. It wants love. It needs happiness.

One boy wrote that confidence is a large animal with rainbow skin; another boy wrote that love lives in the jungle and is as fast as a cheetah, chasing the girl he wants. Sadness lives in a hidden place, one girl wrote. Shyness lives in a house that’s too big, wrote another. According to one child, fear can’t see anymore because he’s sewn his own eyes shut.

In between classes I saw a group of students I wouldn’t see until later in the day. “Hey!” one called out. “Ms... Ms... Wait, what’s your name?” 

“Dohrmann,” I said. 

“Oh yeah! Ms. Dohrmann! Poetry lady, right?” 

“Poetry lady, right.” 

I have been Poetry Lady in dozens of New York City schools for more than a decade. I am a little tired of being Poetry Lady. I was extra tired of being Poetry Lady today. Tired is an animal with no bones and sagging skin, I might have said if I’d written a poem along with my students. Its clothes are too big and its shoes hurt.

Then a boy wrote that fear becomes anger without realizing it. 

“How’d you know that?” I asked. 

He shrugged his shoulders. “Everybody knows that,” he said.

“No they don’t. Nope, they sure don’t. I think that’s an excellent observation. I really do. It’s so insightful.”

He looked over his poem. He was starting to smile. 

“You appreciating your genius?” I teased.

"Nah,” he said.

“Oh no no! No shame in that! I mean, that’s one of the best parts of writing—the part where you get to sit back and appreciate your genius.”

He smiled. “OK, miss,” he said.

Then one of the teachers’ assistants came over to me at the end of class to show me her poem. She needed help with a stanza on love being enslaved in her heart. Hm. We talked about whether the word “enslaved” might have been the culprit here. “Is the word ‘enslaved’ the right one?” I asked. “Maybe...I dunno...maybe you just mean ‘stuck’?” 

“No,” she said, “No, it’s definitely ‘enslaved.’” 

“OK, then slave to what?”

“Aye!” she shouted. “That’s it! That’s my problem! I don’t know!” 

At the end of my final class, I heard a group of students argue about whether love has wings or arms.

“Wings! To fly up in the air,” one girl insisted.

“Arms to hug!” another girl said.

I wondered to myself: Why would tired need shoes at all if it has no bones? That doesn’t make sense.

Slipping behind on deadlines, slipping behind on triathlon training. (Could there be any worse phrase than “slipping behind”?)  

Last night a brief dream where I’m back in high school again and that awful dread comes over me as I get ready for school in the morning: I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to go to math. How awful that was in real life, sitting in a classroom where everyone else understood concepts that to me were impossible, and the double-time I had to do to try to keep up, mostly to cover my shame. Math was the kind of thing that determined if you were smart or not: those who were good at math were “gifted”; those who weren’t, but strong at other subjects, were “good students”. The curse of the good-student stamp. 

Yesterday, two rejections in one day. But I was too busy reading newspaper copy for ten solid hours at a breakneck pace to think about the rejections at the time they’d landed in my inbox. When I reread them on my way home, tired, dry-eyed, my makeup entirely melted off and a deep groove wedged into the bridge of my nose, a delayed disappointment knifed through. I felt my insides fold into themselves. An inside Sarah retracted and fell on to another inside Sarah, on to another inside Sarah—like Russian nesting dolls—until the very smallest Sarah cried a tiny bit, but only to herself. 

After all, I couldn’t think about it for too long. I had work to do when I got home, though of course I could produce only three sentences, which took me the better part of two hours to write. 

No wonder another dream I had last night was of crawling on all fours on an NFL football field while the game was in play. I felt like I was drugged, my body unable to align with the panic that grew inside me, fearing I would no doubt get trounced. The players didn’t seem to see me, I was invisible to them, though the crowds screamed at me, and the volume of their voices colluded with my fear inside. And then I noticed how green the grass was out there, so green it was garish—I noticed this—and I noticed there was trash on the field, what looked like candy bar wrappers, which surprised me for an NFL football field. There was something wrong with me, obviously. I knew I could die out there but all I could seem to do was observe things.

The grass is greener now than I thought it would be. The trees are budding, the daffodils and lilacs have bloomed. In Bryant Park on a weekday evening, two kids speak a language I don’t recognize as they sing a song, giggling after a certain verse while their parents stare into iPhones. There are red and yellow tulips surrounding the lawn and a carousel that plays Édith Piaf songs. An expert city woman is asleep in a folding chair near me, her left arm entwined in the strap of her handbag, clasping the hand of her right.

I am writing. I am reading Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In her essay “Two Arrowheads,” she compares relationships to houses. In describing a relationship she’s had, she says, “For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”

In early summer of last year, I was in this very park with a man with whom I’d built something like a lean-to, something we could hitch to the nearest tree to protect us temporarily from the elements. We hadn’t really gotten as far as a house. We had our own dwellings. His most beloved treasures lived in his; my house was an idea.

Bryant Park last year, early summer: a weekend morning at one of the metal cafe tables on the edge of the lawn. We drank coffee and thought up the day: we’d brunch, we’d make it happy. It wasn’t happy. We kept missing our subway stops and then I cried for no real reason except the biggest reason of all.

That was then. I am a little fatter now. I am surrounded by tulips and daffodils and lilacs now—mulch in a few weeks. People walk by in a hurry, heavy bags weighing on weakened shoulders. Cops circle the perimeter. Piaf sings “La Vie en Rose.” Solnit writes, “A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn’t.” I don’t know where the man is now. He could be in a city in a hotel. Maybe in an apartment. Maybe he’s in a house that is a home. Maybe he’s in a car, maybe in a restaurant, maybe in an elevator going up. Maybe he’s in bed with another woman, building a better story than a stupid lean-to.

On drives in Iowa across Interstate 80, Grandma used to comment on the clouds. It was a kind of big sky country, a place where the corn fields are never not described as “gently rolling,” because there’s simply no other way to describe the corn fields, unless you’re not from Iowa and the best you can do is call the landscape “flat”. It’s country where sky takes up more of your view than land, where clouds demand comment because they’re almost the only things to look at as you drive through Iowa. “I love clouds,” Grandma would say not long, maybe, after we’d philosophized about God.

I have been in Mexico for a few days for a friend’s destination 40th birthday celebration, looking out at the town from our condo that sits high on a hillside. When I am not on the hillside, looking below at the village and the expansive sky above it and the ocean just beyond the village, I am at the beach, my feet in hot sand, looking at the ocean waves roll in at a slant. My mind is doing that thing that happens when on vacation: it’s cracking open, my worries like wood-boring insects scurrying to the surface of what I am now realizing is a mind going to rot.

I can see my life now, see it in the sky and see it in the rolling waves, see it by observing where my mind goes as my thoughts slacken, and the seeing of it frightens me from this perch. I work too hard in New York. I am in love with someone who isn’t present in my life, but still I can’t seem to let my want of him go. I am busier than I’d like to be, poorer than I want to be, trying harder than I’d like to—to what? Trying to what? I’ve gotten lost in a schedule that overwhelms me. I want to succeed. These are gray and black and brown and unmoving clouds that sit inside the hillside copse, threatening a rain and a wind that could blow off the pretty tiled rooftops of the homes below.